


3 Piercings

by rohpsohpic



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Angst, Angst and Humor, Best Friends, Childhood Friends, Coming of Age, Conversations, Cussing, Decisions, Drug Dealing, Ear Piercings, Friendship, House Party, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Mention of Making Out, Mention of a Piercing Gun, Mild Blood, Needles, Piercings, Shopping Malls, Slice of Life, Teen Angst, Time Skips, Underage Drinking, Underage Smoking, Unrequited Love, Warnings May Change
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2019-08-01 08:17:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16280918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rohpsohpic/pseuds/rohpsohpic
Summary: It's senior year in Los Angeles, and Joshua has a few things to figure out—the least of which is his best friend, Jeonghan.





	1. Lobes (2)

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS.  
> WARNINGS.  
> WARNINGS.
> 
>  
> 
> ADDITIONAL WARNING: Do not try this at home.

Joshua’s room is so much easier to digest in daylight. Faint glow-in-the-dark stars dot the ceiling like cookie-cut slices of provolone. Obscurely stained couch cushions shuffle around on his armchair once every week. A blanket or two is pulled up to the headboard of his bed, neatly made even in the stubborn late summer heat. Looking in on this picture of a proper, authority-fearing son, a stranger would not see the grayed paint on the windowsill, smudged by phantasmal fingerprints, or the ash, all-too-easily mistaken for dust, lining every crevice like grime under fingernails. No one bothers to turn off the revolving fan that Joshua keeps between his half-cluttered desk and his half-cracked window; no one smells the smoke that clings half-heartedly to the secondhand furniture of Joshua’s room. In fact, Joshua stopped bothering to Febreze the smell since last month, and no one is any the wiser.

Well. There’s _one_.

When Jeonghan walks in, he immediately crosses to the window and pushes it wide open, gulping in a deep breath of fresh air. This place is so stifling. The fan is on, as always, but the air is stale. Joshua is in a phase of pretending not to care about ventilation, and Jeonghan makes it a point to remind him how much he hates it.

“You suck,” Jeonghan hisses to Joshua, still trying to swallow as much air as possible.

“Actually, I think it’s more like blowing,” Joshua offers his scholarly opinion from the mostly-deflated bean bag wedged between his bed and the wall, dirty clouds coming out of his pretty mouth like they own the place. A smoldering cigarette glows darkly between two fingers.

“Nice punctuation,” Jeonghan deadpans as the smoke rises thickly.

“Nice socks,” Joshua returns.

He at least has the decency to get to his feet, pulling himself up by the frame of his bed, grimacing as ash lands on his pillow and shaking it out with his free hand. Still, Joshua makes no move to assist Jeonghan when the latter excavates a bamboo folding fan—sent by a well-meaning aunt in her long-distance quest to “culture” her overseas nephew—from the mess of Joshua’s desk and chases the gray cloud until the air is somewhat breathable.

“Got them on clearance.”

Joshua makes an “ah” noise, and Jeonghan frowns so intensely at the smoke that escapes from his mouth that Joshua finally puts out the cigarette with an obliging smile. He casually slips the ashtray back under the bed when he’s done, making sure to cover it with a few crumpled college brochures.

Sighing, Jeonghan sits by the open window, where the hot August air is fractionally less gross but where the revolving fan doesn’t quite reach. Sunlight lights up his neatly combed hair. He tries manually fanning himself only to have his nose wrinkle at the hint of smoke clinging to the paper. He refolds the fan and lets it dangle in his hand. “Please go back to using Febreze.”

“Never.”

“As your best friend, it is my duty to inform you that your room smells like shit. _You_ smell like shit. Joshua Hong, I refuse to have a best friend who smells this shitty.”

“Jeonghan, I smell just fine,” Joshua rolls his eyes.

“You literally smell worse than you did that day when you had to assist with seventeen moxibustion appointments in a row.”

Joshua joins Jeonghan under the window and puts a sympathetic hand on his shoulder, looking into his earnest eyes as he says, slowly and deliberately, “I’m sorry that moxa happens to smell like weed.” Sitting down, he adds, “I’m also sorry that you don’t like the smell of weed.”

Joshua is expecting it when Jeonghan tries to flick his ear. When Joshua dodges out of the way, Jeonghan settles for whacking his shoulder with the folded hand fan. Joshua laughs and pushes his face away.

“Okay, okay, I stink,” he concedes, holding an admonished hand over his shoulder. “Don’t break my fan. I’ll take more showers.”

Jeonghan hums grudgingly, letting Joshua wiggle the fan out of his hand and put it back on his desk, a cacophony of school projects and old notes, the organized mess of an upstanding high school student. There is an orderly chaos to Joshua’s room, a systematic presentability with an occulted wildness. Joshua’s couch is an upholstered rainbow of stained cushions that sink under Jeonghan’s feet when he tries to sit on it with his whole body, but that doesn’t stop them from spending a whole hour sitting there together, talking about everything from the shipment of new herbs that arrived at the clinic this morning to the loud rising sophomore that works with Jeonghan at Bath & Body Works before finally switching to adjacent perches on Joshua’s bed. Joshua’s bed is a picturesque example of folded blankets and hospital corners, but under it is an ashtray and one or two thin, half-used boxes of cigarettes. And college brochures, Jeonghan registers when he happens to glance down from the edge.

Curious, Jeonghan pokes one of his feet in and slides out a battered blue-and-yellow paper with “UCLA” printed boldly across the front. He holds it up to Joshua and raises his eyebrows, offering an enticing smile. “Thinking about graduation?”

“No,” Joshua says, a flat edge to his voice. He pretends not to see the brochure, waiting until Jeonghan finishes flipping through it and throws it back under the bed. When he does, Joshua seems to let out a breath. “Senior year doesn’t start until next week.”

“Shua, I know that you’re a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy, but this is cutting it kind of close, even for you.”

Joshua clenches his jaw. It’s a bit of a sore point, his general indecision with what to do with his future.

“I know.”

End of topic. Joshua lets himself fall all the way down and presses the back of his head into the purely cosmetic comforter that he never actually sleeps with in the summer, eyes angled toward the ceiling of plastic stars, as if he can push the answers out if he tries hard enough. Next to him, Jeonghan generously makes no comment.

Jeonghan had sneaked into Joshua’s room one night, an “excursion,” he called it, to position all the stars by hand. He swears otherwise, but when Joshua looks up, he can recognize the loose, freehanded outlines of the constellations glowing with his best friend’s quiet whirlwind of perfectionism. Big stars and little stars that will always whisper summer back at him.

“Seriously,” Joshua says, lying with one hand flat on his stomach, “How long did it take you?”

Joshua does that sometimes, asking questions without context. Jeonghan is generally better at deciphering them than most, but maybe that’s because he’s just as bad, prone to leaping between topics without transitions. Jeonghan traces his gaze to the stars and seems to connect the dots.

“Too long for an ungrateful brat like you, that’s for sure,” Jeonghan replies too easily as he kicks back to join him, knowing that it’s the deflective answer Joshua expects but isn’t looking for. The bedsprings hiss and squeal, the downy comforter bouncing around Joshua’s ears as Jeonghan goes through the motions of lying down without ever really settling. Somehow, despite the calm look on his face, Joshua gets the feeling that Jeonghan is never quite content. He’s the kind of person who dreams big, who hangs stars, who lights matches without burning them. Even Joshua can’t contain that much. “Your bed is old.”

“Your face is old.”

“Your humor is old.”

“ _Your_ humor is old.”

Jeonghan snakes a hand through the maze of disheveled bedding, latching onto the delicate shell of Joshua’s ear and clamping down hard. Joshua’s voice vanishes—he doesn’t want to give Jeonghan the satisfaction of yelping; then he would never hear the end of it—as he reciprocates in kind, pinching Jeonghan’s ear right back in a silent battle of the wills.

Which, being the stubborn shits that they are, naturally goes on forever.

“This really hurts.”

“Who taught you how to pinch this hard?”

“I did. You’re just weak.”

“You little—”

“Ow, ow, ow! Okay, count of three?”

“. . .”

“One. Two. Three.”

“. . . You know it’s not going to be that easy, right?”

“Agh. Fine.”

Joshua rolls off first, making sure to give Jeonghan’s ear one last exasperated twist. Jeonghan lets go of Joshua with much more ease, probably because he is silently laughing. The smiling glint of his teeth almost floats in the dark, a real Chesire grin. When Joshua turns his face away to sulk into his pillow, Jeonghan tries to tug it out from under him.

“Aw, don’t be mad,” he entreats. Joshua doesn’t budge. “We were having fun just then.”

“I’m not mad.”

“Well, you’re not napping in the middle of the day, either,” Jeonghan points out, fighting a fresh wave of exasperation out of his voice. “That means you’re mad.”

Silence.

“Have you ever thought of getting a piercing?”

Joshua still doesn’t look, but his pillow-muffled voice comes out like an olive branch. “That’s random, Jeonghan.” It’s an old quip that he uses, signaling that he knows when Jeonghan is changing subjects but isn’t going to argue. The frustration ebbs a little. “It’s not like I’m going to.”

“Come on, you can be hypothetical,” Jeonghan appeals. “Piercing, yes or no?”

“A piercing? I don’t know, Jeonghan.”

“You could pull it off.”

Joshua pulls his face out of the pillow to give him a dubious look. Seizing the opportunity, Jeonghan reaches for Joshua’s ear more gently, just to cup it. Joshua freezes, the breath sucked out of him by the sudden contact, but Jeonghan doesn’t seem to notice, staring at the side of his face intently enough to burn. Batting off physical contact is nothing when they’re just fooling around, but he can never quite figure out what he’s supposed to do when Jeonghan gets into one of his more examining moods.

Suddenly, Jeonghan’s nose scrunches up, snapping Joshua out of his stupor. “You still smell like shit.”

“You still _are_ shit,” Joshua replies on reflex, and Jeonghan is so amused by the rare display of cursing that he retracts his hand to laugh. The imprint of Jeonghan’s hand feels clammy on Joshua’s face, a side effect of the dry weather. He rubs it off against the pillow. “Okay, your turn. Do you want a piercing?”

Jeonghan absentmindedly touches his own ear, a blink-and-miss-it kind of gesture. Joshua hides the relief that unfurls inside his chest that the ear thing is just another Jeonghan thing, not anything he should be concerned about. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell.

“I think I could handle it, but it’s not my style.”

  

 

 

 

 

 

The pale but fierce September sky threads through Joshua’s hair as he hurries for the mall, bracing the straps of his backpack to keep it from knocking against his tailbone. It's just like Jeonghan to call him at the last minute. He wasn’t even planning on going into town today, wasn’t planning on running past evenly-spaced palm trees in ripped jeans and a graphic tee, but if there's anything Jeonghan knows, it's that he has Joshua wrapped around his finger. And Joshua hates it.

A merciful wave of air-conditioning blasts out as he skids to a socially acceptable pace in front of the automatic doors. Gasping for breath in a way that causes a few shoppers to glance at him in concern—he’s seventeen, almost eighteen, and this is probably his sign to stop smoking—Joshua fixes his clothes and makes for the food court, trying to look as unremarkable as possible. He really hopes that his sweat washes out of this shirt.

The food court is Jeonghan’s default meeting place inside the mall. It's one of the few ways that he adheres to his self-proclaimed motto of keeping work and pleasure separate, as Joshua politely refrains from pointing out because he happens to actually like the mall food court. He thinks it's the curved latticework of the ceiling that does it, the crisscrossing white lines that turn the dome into a bright blue skylight. When he was three or four, his father had taken him to an observatory like that: domed ceiling and electric sky, big hands and blurred face. His father is out of the picture even in his memories.

Jeonghan is sitting at a small round table by himself, nursing a smoothie.

“What took you so—Wow, you look sweaty,” Jeonghan says, pulling the straw out of his mouth as Joshua pulls up a chair. He frowns, eyes doing a once-over on the bangs sticking to Joshua’s forehead and the bedraggled backpack dumped next to his feet. “Did you run here?”

“Yes, Captain Obvious,” Joshua glares, which probably would have been a lot more menacing if he wasn’t still mostly out of breath.

Jeonghan stares at him for a moment, then returns to his smoothie. “Your lungs are shit.”

“Your drink is shit.”

Jeonghan, the insufferable ass, looks bemused. _Slurp_. “It’s so weird when you curse.”

Joshua eyes the smoothie level inside Jeonghan’s clear plastic cup as it falls, slowly but surely. It’s already almost empty, and he’s already preparing himself for the frenetic mess that is Jeonghan on a sugar high. There’s already an unnatural brightness to Jeonghan’s eyes, a spark that usually isn’t there unless he has been hatching some new scheme. They’re barely a month into school, and Jeonghan has already single-handedly covered the principal’s car in hot pink Post-It notes and set off the fire alarm. Granted, the last one was a Chemistry accident involving a lavender-scented hand sanitizer and a Bunsen burner twice his age, but still.

“I got you something,” Jeonghan says before Joshua can ask whether there’s another escapade for him to politely decline. Setting down his now-empty smoothie, Jeonghan lifts up a gingham bag that Joshua hadn’t noticed and pushes it across the table, a smug, expectant, slightly giddy look on his face. “Bath & Body Works” is proudly printed on the side. “Open it.”

Joshua delicately raises his eyebrows. “Isn’t it kind of rude to open it right away?”

Even as he says it, he’s drawing out the pale blue tissue paper. Knowing that he has won, Jeonghan just waits with feigned comfortableness until Joshua reaches the small, thin black-and-white box at the bottom. Hand closing around the lightweight packaging, Joshua pulls out the little box and blinks at the strange, candle-shaped thing inside.

“You got me a light bulb.”

Stifling a laugh, Jeonghan reaches over and flips the box right-side-up. “It’s called a fragrance plug, you idiot.”

Now that it's facing the right way, Joshua can see the word “wallflowers” written prettily across a sticker on the front of the plug. Fitting, Joshua thinks with a sardonic appreciation, but it feels almost too dainty to come from Jeonghan. Glancing over the small print, Joshua reports, “It says it's an eye irritant.”

“You're an eye irritant,” Jeonghan retorts. When Joshua’s lips slide for a second, threatening to smile, something in Jeonghan’s face falters. After a moment’s pause of glancing down at the pastel-colored table, Jeonghan adds quietly, “It would be easier if you quit.”

Joshua doesn't bother answering that. He’s not sure why Jeonghan still bothers to ask when they both know it's not happening any time soon, but then again, everyone is entitled to dream, Jeonghan more than most.

Instead of addressing the pleading undercurrent in Jeonghan’s voice, Joshua neatly places the Wallflowers plug back inside the bag and covers it with plumes of blue tissue paper again, smiling thinly. There's a faint buzz in his chest, the excitement of receiving a gift, but now it's overshadowed by the silent question behind it. He wants to be grateful, wants to turn the conversation back to a lighter note, wants Jeonghan to stop making sad eyes at his smoothie, and so he clears his throat. “Thanks for the plug. I'll try it out.”

“You better,” Jeonghan warns, jumping on board to switch topics, albeit a little less quickly than usual. He braces the empty smoothie with one flitting hand. “I spent seven dollars on that thing.”

“Wow, seven whole dollars,” Joshua echoes, and Jeonghan makes a face at him as he gets up to throw his cup away.

Joshua stands up, swinging his backpack onto the table so that he can tuck the Bath & Body Works bag inside, and tries not to watch Jeonghan do his thing. Despite the teasing tone, Joshua can't help the keen sense of self-consciousness that crawls up his neck, leaving prickling skin in its wake. Jeonghan is the kind of decently-off kid who receives an undisclosed amount of allowance from his parents every week but refuses to spend any of it unless he can match it with his own earnings as a part-time store employee. He is stubborn and proud and utterly bent on snatching every inch of independence he can. It's why, Joshua secretly hypothesizes, Jeonghan pulls pranks and picks colleges and calculates the exact change he needs for gas every week to get to and from work. It's why Jeonghan delegated him as his best friend—because Jeonghan doesn't want to owe anything to anyone, and Joshua is the last person on Earth who would ask him to account for himself.

Joshua doesn't really ask for anything, actually, and he doesn't think he'll ever get over how weird it is getting something from Jeonghan, how perplexing it is to know, doubtlessly, that this is something Jeonghan, the frugal one, the tetherless one, the unsentimental one, spent his own money on. Joshua can't figure out why, and maybe there's something he’s missing, but he pushes it aside and decides to settle for being grateful.

“Seriously, though,” Joshua says as Jeonghan circles back, “Thanks.”

“Aw, don't mention it,” Jeonghan replies, tilting his head with an easygoing smile. He’s sort of standing there, a few feet in front of Joshua with his hands absentmindedly propped on his hips, as if waiting for something else. When Joshua squints at him, he realizes that there’s still that glittery look in Jeonghan’s eyes, a wavery impatience as he stands in place, and it's not just from the smoothie.

Joshua narrows his eyes. “Jeonghan, why did you really call me here?”

This must be the opening that Jeonghan was waiting for because he grins, teeth flashing in the steady stream of sunlight that comes in from the glass ceiling, “Well, I finished my shift, and today is your day off, so I thought we could do some perusing.”

“Perusing” is Jeonghan’s word for window-shopping, for store-hopping, for bumping elbows and debating over snacks and stopping at every kiosk and backlit display case until neither of them can feel their arms or legs and Joshua insists on finding a comfortable bench so that he can let himself liquefy into a miserable mush while Jeonghan cracks jokes over his stamina. Jeonghan has the unfair advantage of knowing that Joshua would never pass it up for anything.

“I have homework,” Joshua warns, pettily, because it’s a weekend and he’s already caving.

“I'm sure your English project wouldn't mind,” Jeonghan grins.

So it comes to be that they buy three cups of fresh pretzel sticks and refill the dip twice; spend half an hour legitimately lost inside a Forever 21; wave at a smiley Seokmin as they pass Bath & Body Works; spontaneously go Dutch on stress balls with little faces on them from a kiosk worker with hamster cheeks that look almost just as squishy; and sequester themselves on the thick edge of an outdoor fountain, punctuating their sentences with watery eruptions and batting each other with the lukewarm water every time one of them says something too dumb or too philosophical or too both. Sometimes, Joshua thinks, not entirely unfondly, that someday, this is what his memories of being a teenager will be like: days gone by in the blink of an eye, hours wasted doing nothing except being together and being too dumb for adulthood and too smart-ass-y for their age. _Splash_.

  

 

 

 

 

 

Joshua sees the party from a quarter of the way down the street, pulsing with maxxed-out stereos and strobe lights that he can guess just how Jeonghan got his hands on. Jeonghan is notorious around their school not only for his pranks, but for his other charms, too. Sleeping. Schmoozing. Throwing parties. Talking anyone into anything. The other houses of their suburb are dark, as if Jeonghan has figured out a way to suck all the light into his house and now it is imploding in bursts of blues and purples. He wouldn’t put it past him.

Joshua tucks the foil-wrapped package under his arm, the rustle all but unnoticeable under the faint waves of music coursing under his shoes.

When Joshua walks inside, not bothering to ring the doorbell, no one bothers to care. The foyer is all slithering bodies and forgotten coats, leather gear, denim jackets, and wool cardigans mashing together on shoe racks and spare corners. One end table is bristling with red plastic cups. The drinks inside ripple whenever someone slams a door or opens the one that leads into the basement, from which Joshua can hear the sound of enthusiastic keyboarding and smooth crooning, no doubt the well-received products of Seokmin’s three-man band. Jeonghan invited them to play one night two or three weeks ago, and by this point, it’s clear that they’re going to be one of the more permanent fixtures at his parties.

It’s like the airwaves are at war in Jeonghan’s house. From the living room, Joshua can hear the intoxicating, stuttering beats of a rap ballad; passing the bathroom, he catches snatches of what sounds like Bruno Mars; in the kitchen, someone is playing “Thriller” as loud as his phone will allow. He doesn’t notice that the live band has taken a break until the basement door bangs open, briefly revealing a roar of applause, and Soonyoung stumbles out, dragging another junior by the sleeves of his sweater and mashing their faces together so hard that Joshua almost expects his make-out buddy’s glasses to break. It’s weird. One day, you’re buying stress balls from some guy at the mall; the next, you see him kissing the living daylights out of that kid from your advanced English class at your best friend’s house party.

Not one for intruding on Soonyoung and Wonwoo’s frighteningly tongue-heavy make-out session, Joshua calls out a polite “wow” and continues on his way. He already knows where he’s headed.

When Joshua comes into the kitchen, which always looks so much bigger and smaller when there are ten-something high schoolers crammed into it, Jeonghan greets him by planting a big, sloppy kiss on the side of his face. He looks good, Joshua registers, wearing his regular jeans and a nice black shirt that gives his dark eyes the impression of depth even if it is clear, looking into them, that he has had a sip or two. One arm comes to rest amiably around Joshua’s shoulders, anchored by an amber bottle of beer. There’s a cooler of mostly-melted ice and a few lingering aluminum cans in front of the kitchen island where Joshua surmises that the drinks must have been; beverage-shaped semicircles are crushed into the valiant floes that remain.

Cracking a faint smile over his best friend’s thick mop of hair, Joshua comments, “You’re looking drunk today.”

“It’s night, Joshua,” Jeonghan snarks back weakly, taking the opportunity to nuzzle his face into the juncture between Joshua’s neck and shoulder. Joshua studiously pretends not to notice, instead focusing on the random partygoers milling around with miscellaneous junk foods and rummaging through Jeonghan’s fridge. Jeonghan sighs into Joshua’s skin, his breath gross and warm, and murmurs at the exact volume necessary to reach only Joshua’s ears, “I’m going to sleep. This is it, Shua, I’m going to sleep. Wake me when I'm eighteen.”

Because, even when he’s maintaining a slight buzz, Jeonghan is too stubborn to say “when the party's over,” and they both know it.

There's a throaty vibration to Jeonghan’s voice that resonates down Joshua’s spine. His mom cat-sits for her friend in the city sometimes, a smushy-faced creature who is probably at least a hundred years old now, and when Joshua was still in middle school, he would tag along and try to pet the kitty whenever he was feeling brave. He learned, over a few weeks, that this cat would run away if he approached first but would come up to him in its own time and on its own terms. And, when the cat was in a remarkably less foul mood, Joshua learned that this particular cat liked being scratched behind the ears. That's what the vibration reminds him of, that full-body purr designed to travel all the way to his toes.

“Really?” Joshua quirks an eyebrow, feigning casual remarkably well. His sleeve is slowly soaking up the condensation on Jeonghan’s bottle, the cotton fibers of his t-shirt greedy like the xylem of a plant, and his headspace is disorientingly hot, almost claustrophobic, where Jeonghan is resting, and he is scared to pull away first.

Jeonghan huffs, a light chuckle. “No, not really.”

Jeonghan chooses that moment to release him, and again, Joshua feels that sense of hyperawareness where Jeonghan had just been. Just when he remembers the package hanging helplessly in his fingers, Jeonghan hones in on it, too.

“Is that for me?” he asks, an insufferable grin blossoming across his face as he nods his bottle in its direction and takes a swig.

Joshua shakes his head and shifts so that he has both arms secured around the package with what he hopes is a matching smirk. The foil crackles under his fingers. “Not until you’re eighteen.”

Jeonghan watches him for a moment with an unreadable expression. Then someone drops a can of Pepsi on the floor, sticky brown liquid immediately slashing a jagged line over the linoleum tiles, and Jeonghan gives him a thin, tired smile. “Eighteen can't come soon enough,” he says in that low, hidden voice.

Then he digs a fistful of napkins out of the pantry closet and hands them off to the shocked-looking freshman responsible for the spill, a kid with a strong, square jaw and soft, scared eyes. Duty calls. Even on his birthday eve, surrounded by people who don't know any better, Jeonghan can’t let go of his pride as a host. Taking his cue to leave, Joshua ducks out of the kitchen, bracing the gift to his chest while being careful not to crush it. The last Joshua sees of the kitchen is Jeonghan repeating the same nuzzly greeting with a newly-surfaced Seokmin. Joshua shakes his head, an upward quirk to his lips, and disappears up the stairs when no one else is looking. Jeonghan knows where to find him.

Jeonghan’s room is a sharp contrast to his character. It's no surprise to Joshua that Jeonghan would choose to make his room appear as the epitome of teenage rebellion, refusing to make his bed or hide his mess. Pens are strewn across the room. Half-printed papers are simply dropped on the floor. Socks can be found on every surface from Jeonghan's lava lamp to his laptop, all washed with a fresh-smelling detergent, all mismatched. At first glance, there is no rhyme or reason to Jeonghan’s interior design; it stands in complete contrast to Jeonghan’s taste for immaculacy and eye for minute detail. Joshua thinks he has it figured out, though. Joshua thinks that Jeonghan is trying to make a point.

Peeling off his shoes is a relief. Joshua sets his Vans down in one of the few spots on Jeonghan’s floor that isn’t covered in questionably clean laundry or tiny plastic jacks and takes the liberty of plopping himself onto Jeonghan’s bed with a long-awaited sigh. The aluminum foil around his gift is starting to go soft, so he leaves it on the nightstand in hopes that it will hold itself together long enough for Jeonghan to open it. Jeonghan’s laptop is already lying, abandoned, at the center of the mattress. After a moment of just lying there and letting the distant, muffled sounds of the party sink in, Joshua tugs it over, removes a fox-patterned sock from the keyboard, and boots it up.

Three hours later, as the party winds down, Jeonghan enters the room to find Joshua calmly torrenting Season 4 of _Sailor Moon_.

“Our resident pirate,” Jeonghan declares, pulling at the laptop.

“Arr,” Joshua responds. He successfully holds the laptop in place, smiling involuntarily when Jeonghan lets out a defeated sigh and settles for lying down somewhere behind him, exhausted.

“You know it isn't yours, right?” Jeonghan asks, idly trying to sneak a hand onto the touchpad so that he can mess with the download. It's their afterparty, Joshua blithely wreaking havoc on Jeonghan’s computer and Jeonghan blinking slowly in his bed. Later, they might even make it to Season 5.

Jeonghan is turning eighteen, and the rest of the world is none the wiser.

Joshua doesn't even look up as he singsongs, “Pirate.”

Jeonghan laughs, a tired but gentle sound that feels warm and soft like a fireplace. He sounds like he could fall asleep at any minute.

Joshua suddenly remembers something.

“Speaking of yours,” Joshua says, trying to nonchalantly incline his head toward the nightstand but instead turning it into a less-than-smooth jerk of his chin.

At the reminder of the present, Jeonghan props himself up on an elbow to glance at the nightstand then back at Joshua. He lifts his eyebrows slightly. “Aren't you going to get it for me?”

Joshua pauses for a moment, hands still on the computer. “It took half an hour to get to twenty percent. You better not shut it down now,” Joshua warns. Never mind the fact that it's Jeonghan’s computer. Joshua has been using it for anime even before he figured out Jeonghan's password. Which was “password.”

Relenting, Joshua rolls off the bed to retrieve the gift as Jeonghan teasingly grabs at the laptop. He has no real interest in closing it, though, so he just leaves it on the download screen and lowers the brightness so that it doesn't use up too much battery.

“You know,” Jeonghan mentions as Joshua holds out the gift with both hands, “technically, I have been eighteen for seventeen hours now.”

“That's great. Really trippy.”

“Skip the sarcasm,” Jeonghan rolls his eyes, already prying open the big metallic leaves of aluminum foil. Joshua barely has time to worry his lip before Jeonghan reveals the cookies, weird mixes of nuts and raisins and coconut shavings and unidentifiable food objects that have hardened to room temperature. Jeonghan looks up. “Did you bake these?”

Joshua pointedly glances at the eclectic batch of ragtag cookies. “Do you really have to ask?”

Finding this valid, Jeonghan picks up a Nutella cookie and takes a tentative whiff. When it passes this test, he holds it up to eye level and examines it against the strange orange glow of his lava lamp. “This is going to leave crumbs.”

“That's generally what birthday cookies do, Jeonghan.”

“As opposed to what, non-birthday cookies?”

Joshua decides not to pursue this argument, preferring to sit back and watch Jeonghan take the first bite. It's satisfying, the way Jeonghan’s face lightens with pleasant surprise. He still doesn’t look entirely awake, but he chews for a while, slowly, like a connoisseur. It’s nice, Joshua realizes, being able to just relax like this. Jeonghan’s look turns grudgingly thoughtful as he finishes the cookie.

“These aren't entirely horrible,” he concedes.

Joshua shrugs, watching as Jeonghan carefully refolds the aluminum foil around the remaining cookies, marveling how the Jeonghan who refuses to rip the most disposable choices in wrapping paper, who applies early for colleges, who throws parties every week even though they drain him, who always lets the fresh air into Joshua’s room, and who handles these small wonders with such care is also the Jeonghan who lets his own room go to waste. Joshua wonders why Jeonghan doesn't let himself be known for these charms, for all the microscopic battles that come with his aspirations of becoming a better person, but if Joshua is being honest with his selfish side, he doesn't mind having this Jeonghan to himself. Distracted by these musings, he returns, “You aren't entirely horrible.”

And there it is again. Jeonghan, looking at him with something unreadable in his eyes. He looks tired but awake. Joshua sees a sudden glimmer in his face.

Making up his mind, Jeonghan sets the foil-wrapped cookies back onto the nightstand and slides off the bed, holding up Joshua’s shoes and gesturing for him to follow suit.

“Get in the Vans. We’re going to the mall.”

“Jeonghan, the mall closed at nine.”

“I know a guy.”

Jeonghan’s guy is a bright-eyed Claire’s employee who goes by Jun. For someone called in at about two in the morning, Jun is shockingly energetic as he leads them inside and turns on the lights, babbling all the while. Within five minutes of meeting him, Joshua finds out that Jun is a fellow senior, a cat person, a pianist, and a Gemini.

“Wait,” Joshua says, standing near a rack of sunglasses and trying to be as unobtrusive as possible while Jun is busy searching the back room for something, “so that means you were born in . . . ?”

“June,” Jun readily fills in, not noticing when Jeonghan elbows Joshua hard in the ribs. Misattributing the strangled noise that comes out of Joshua’s mouth, Jun happily chuckles, “I know, right?”

Joshua absentmindedly rubs his wound. He still doesn't know what Jeonghan is planning, but the fact that they're inside a Claire’s is already giving him a few guesses, none of them good. Even so, all his suppositions do nothing to lessen the surprise when Jun emerges with a bright blue piercing gun in hand.

“So, do you know which earrings you want?” Jun asks, looking right at Joshua.

His face screams innocence, but Joshua’s mind screams something else:

Oh, no. No way.

Instead of answering, Joshua turns to give Jeonghan what he hopes is a withering glare. However, he has a feeling that he might be coming off as more frazzled than anything, judging from the not-very-reassuring smile that Jeonghan gives him in return. Frazzlement, too, would be an accurate description of what he’s feeling. They’ve only discussed piercings once, and even then, it had been hypothetical. At least, Joshua had thought it was hypothetical. This whole situation is an unprecedented violation of that boundary, and Joshua is just confused.

“I saw you glancing at earrings the last time we perused the mall,” Jeonghan explains, evenly, like it's no big deal. “You're more obvious than you think.”

“That doesn't mean I actually want a piercing! Jeonghan, my mom would ground me for life.”

“You've never been grounded before,” Jeonghan rolls his eyes, trying to ease Joshua forward. Joshua’s jaw tightens. “This wouldn't be such a bad place to start.”

“It would. It would be such a bad place.”

Joshua’s voice is cracking a little and he doesn't know why. At the checkout counter, Jun is idly making shapes with his cheeks and poking his fingers of his free hand into them. The other is still wrapped around the piercing gun, holding it at a safe distance. When he happens to glance over and catch Joshua’s unease, he slides into a concerned frown for the first time in their short acquaintance. He puts the piercing gun down on the counter. “Hey, it doesn't have to be the piercing gun. I'm training for a salon, so I know how to use needles, too. But you really don't have to get a piercing at all, especially if you're uncomfortable. My job isn't to scare you. If you need more time, that's not a problem.”

Joshua softens at Jun’s words, but they don't even begin to stifle the indignation flaming under his skin. Jeonghan is still insistent on acting nonchalant, but Joshua can see how he has started looking at the floor, letting a curtain of bangs hang over his face. Jeonghan is always running into things head first, rushing in like time is a race, reaching for hypotheticals without knowing if he’s ready, but this one feels like a betrayal of trust. It's not like Jeonghan to push him into something without consulting him first. A piercing is one surprise that Joshua doesn't take lightly. Piercings last.

Jun’s earring glints in the fluorescent lighting as he passes them to put the piercing gun away. It’s a long, silver earring that reminds Joshua of the wind chimes they keep in front of the clinic.

Joshua averts his eyes, but they catch on the reflection in the dark, glossy store window. Overlaying the ghostly mall, he can see the displays of accessories, the wall of little stuffed animals, the multitude of earrings standing silently on their delicate hooks, the microcosm of the store in one dreamlike scene, every detail down to the slow, sullen shuffle of Jeonghan's feet and the bewildered, out-of-his-element furrow in his own eyebrows rendered clearly on the glass. Joshua sucks in a breath, fighting the urge to touch his face. He knows he doesn't have Jun’s loose posture or Jeonghan's smoldering assurance, but the contrast is so much clearer when he is seeing it reflected in third person. With his clean-cut looks and methodical clothes, Joshua doesn't look spontaneous or rebellious. He doesn't look like he just walked out of a party, and maybe he really didn't, because he always steps through Jeonghan’s front door but never enters the fray, choosing to retreat upstairs while everyone else is in the floors below, being young and making bad choices and losing pieces of themselves and gaining others. The worst thing Joshua has ever done is smoke, and even then, it’s only in the privacy of his room. Nothing visible, not like Jeonghan with his extravaganzas or Seokmin with his band or Soonyoung with his libido or Jun with his earring.

Joshua doesn't mean to—he doesn’t want to give Jeonghan the satisfaction; he has already determined that Jeonghan is never going to hear the end of this—but he makes up his mind.

“Let's do the needles,” Joshua says before Jun can close the door to the back room. Jun pauses, a surprised but hopeful expression blossoming across his features. He’s not the only one. Joshua can feel Jeonghan’s astounded gaze prickling on the side of his face. Trying to blot out the burning feeling snaking up his neck, he adds, “In the, uh, lobes. If it's not too late.”

“It's never too late!” Jun exclaims, immediately rushing back inside like some piercer fairy. He sounds so enthusiastic that Joshua can't help letting out a relieved breath. “I'm a morning person anyway! I'm totally awake for this.”

Meanwhile, Jeonghan is staring at him with wide eyes, sulking forgotten. “Both lobes?” he asks incredulously, as if checking whether this is the same Joshua.

“What about it?”

Jeonghan shrugs meditatively, but his expression remains openly curious. “I don't know, I was thinking something more asymmetrical.”

Joshua gawps at him. This, coming from the person who dragged him here in the first place. It’s unfairly difficult to focus on being angry when Jeonghan has a habit of distracting him with this brand of input. Then again, Jeonghan has always been something of a perfectionist. Throwing his hands up, Joshua finally gives up on trying to decipher his best friend’s mind and asks, “Am I getting a piercing or not?”

“Right, right, your call,” Jeonghan says, a slight upward curve to his lips that Joshua finds more than a little annoying at the moment. He claps Joshua on the shoulder. “You do you.”

Saving Joshua from a reply, Jun emerges from the back room again. Jun seems to be trying to control the nervous, giddy smile on his face with little success, but Joshua finds that suddenly, he doesn't quite mind. Once he has his mind made up, a cold sense of calm seems to have taken over. “Are you ready?”

So just like that, Joshua gets his first piercings, one in each lobe. And he gets grounded for a week.

(Later, his mom reluctantly admits that the imitation diamond studs do look good on him, and he gives her a long hug because he has a feeling that they won't be his last piercings. Not by a long shot.)


	2. Midear (2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A SIDE STORY IN THE SUMMARY:  
> “I love you,” Joshua says, a thoughtless, distracted phrase in passing.
> 
> It’s enough to make Jeonghan look at him with an open-mouthed expression, though, the one that he gets when he’s surprised. These days, surprise is rare. Jeonghan seems to know everything already, seems to have made himself invincible in face of the unknown, and Joshua isn’t anywhere near there yet. Jeonghan doesn’t make a move to sit up, but he still has on that strangely vulnerable expression when he asks, “You do?”
> 
> Joshua doesn’t spare him a glance, brushing off the odd mood as Jeonghan’s usual banter. “Most of the time.”
> 
> If Jeonghan’s face is falling, Joshua determines, it must be a trick of the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't realize until I was writing this chapter that Jeonghan and Joshua and sometimes Jun are the only ones who have any actual dialogue, and I decided to roll with it. I wanted to update closer to the beginning of January, but that kind of failed, so now it's the middle of January and finally, this fic has a second chapter, and it's even longer than the first.

Everyone in a five-mile radius knows what the clinic is.

No further elaboration is necessary for the close-knit, diminutive chiropractic center nestled between the polished shell of a family dentistry and the neon-lit shack of a friendly neighborhood psychic. It used to be a rival dentistry until Joshua’s mother bought the old two-story building during the housing crisis a few years back and made it her own. She refurnished the second floor, which previously consisted of six equally-sized operatories squeezed into neat lines on opposite sides of a long hallway like two rows of braced teeth, with secondhand furniture bartered from yard sales and flea markets and wrangled it into something remotely hospitable. She even scraped together the money to install an oven and a stove. There are still marks on the linoleum floor where dental chairs used to sit. Sometimes, Joshua swears that there are ghosts present, and Jeonghan only scoffs and assures him that he is being absurd. After they moved in, it wasn’t supposed to become a clinic again, but as Joshua’s mother took on more and more walk-in patients and the decayed waiting room, unconverted from its days as a dentistry, saw more and more familiar faces, somehow, it morphed into a business. Not all of it is pseudoscience; they also stock prescription drugs and offer flu shots, but the pharmaceutical side of the clinic is mostly forgotten. Most of the orders they receive for take-home treatments err on the unconventional. Incense is in high demand year-round, whether it’s burned in the chiropractic or retailed in a user-friendly package. As far as alternative medicine goes, the clinic is where most people report.

It’s also where Joshua works as a receptionist. On days that are less busy, his mother lets him come into the back rooms to shadow. Other days, he helps with orders and deliveries.

Today, the clinic is closing early for Thanksgiving break. Joshua's fairly certain that it isn't common practice to close up shop the evening before Thanksgiving, but it's part of his mother's eternal struggle to make the place feel like a home. He wonders, sometimes, in the moments when she watches him burn mugwort or wash candle holders in the same sink they use for their dishes with a wistful, untraceable frown, if she thinks the whole clinic is an insurmountable step back from this dream.

The last customer of the day is a short, studiously blank-faced student whom Joshua vaguely recognizes from school. The customer's eyes dart briefly to where Jeonghan is slumped in a waiting chair, the sole other soul in the room, blatantly asleep, before landing on Joshua with grim determinism. He can't be older than Joshua is, and yet, he's here to pick up a prescription. Joshua finds the paper bag with his name on it, Lee Jihoon, and sets it on the counter. Jihoon asks for herbs as he fishes out his wallet, a leather thing that looks like it has been passed down through many hands. Joshua names a price. Jihoon hesitates, his stolid expression flickering in a moment of vulnerability, and takes it.

Joshua shouldn't feel so bad when he expressionlessly pulls out a Ziploc bag from under the counter, stuffed with crushed yellow-green herbs and labeled with a single letter M, and passes it to Jihoon. Joshua shouldn't feel like he is sinking with a stranger when Jihoon immediately shields it under his body-engulfing parka, a flash of some indefinite sorrow in his eyes that Joshua's brain can't catch up with, and forcibly slides the money onto the counter. Joshua shouldn't feel like a fraud when he reminds Jihoon of the prescription that, in his haste to leave, the other student nearly forgets on the counter. Joshua shouldn't feel like an imposter when he's holding out the bag and his eyes skirt past Jeonghan's napping form as Jihoon slows down and releases a breath and walks back for the bag and looks at Joshua with something unhurried and unhidden and understanding and unjudging and unsaid in his face. Joshua shouldn't feel like a betrayal to some deep part of himself when he lets Jihoon leave with the medicine he needed and didn't need, wanted and didn't want.

Joshua waits in the silent hum of the clinic and wonders what he's waiting for. Inadvertently, inevitably, he has ended up staring at Jeonghan without realizing it.

The latter is sleeping with his legs stretched and arms folded, an expressionless frown on his face. His head is tilted back, leaning in the juncture between the curve of the plastic chair and the brittle, flaking yellow paint of the waiting room wall. Joshua has been suggesting forever, it seems, to cover it with wallpaper, but whenever he brings it up, his mother only smiles wanly and says she'll see what she can do. The faded color blends into Jeonghan's fine, fanned hair. It's funny. When Jeonghan sleeps, he looks about as harmless as an angel. At school, he has developed something of a reputation for falling asleep at the strangest times. Once, he woke up in the gym's storage closet with a basketball still in his hand. The entire school is befuddled. Joshua is just incredulous that Jeonghan keeps getting away with it without anybody taking his stuff.

Well. He's also concerned.

Joshua knows better than all the increasingly ridiculous speculations floating around campus: despite all of Jeonghan's planning and pacing, early action deadlines have been hard on him. He's taking all the sleep he can get. At the same time, Jeonghan insists on taking days like this to spend with Joshua, and Joshua can't dissuade him despite his best intentions. The past few weeks, it seems like they have been having the same conversation on loop.

That conversation goes like this:

“Jeonghan, you need to sleep.”

“Why do I need to sleep when I'm here with my favorite person? Honestly, Shua, you're such a stubborn little shit.”

“Me? _I'm_ the stubborn little shit?”

And so on.

It inevitably, unvaryingly ends with a speechless, frustrated Joshua giving in to Jeonghan's demands. It's worse because despite the tired circles under his eyes, Jeonghan still manages to look aggravatingly smug about it every time.

At least this stubborn little shit is still a good enough person to feel a flicker of remorse before he dutifully prompts Jeonghan to rise and shine. Jeonghan's orders.

“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” Joshua nudges Jeonghan in the leg.

Jeonghan raises his head and bats his eyes, a teasing smile flickering over his mouth. “You think I’m sleeping?”

It’s Jeonghan’s way of asking, “You think I’m beautiful?”

Joshua pushes him in the shoulder. “Figure of speech.”

“You know, you’re supposed to wake me with a kiss,” Jeonghan points out, a note of petulance in his voice, but when Joshua spares him a glance, he is already stretching his cramped arms and settling his gaze on Joshua with his chin resting on the heel of his hand anyway. The corner of his elbow is propped on the end table with its scant selection of magazines. They’re all from 2012, the year when Joshua’s mother finally subscribed to a limited number of publications in order to build up a reading selection for their patients. Just in case the world was ending. She never renewed them. Joshua has read them all.

Joshua likewise ignores his comment, choosing to flip the sign in the window from “OPEN” to “CLOSED.”

“You know, in the original fairy tale—”

“Shut up, Mr. AP-Eng,” Jeonghan says without bite. He blinks slowly and reaches up to rub at his eyes. “No fun facts until I'm actually awake. Until then, no fun facts allowed. Then. When I'm awake.”

“Jeonghan, you clearly need more sleep.”

In response, Jeonghan makes a sloppy gesture that is supposed to mean shush but looks more like swinging his arm in a sketchy elliptical.

“I said no fun facts!”

So Joshua brushes invisible dust off the counter and straightens chairs into arbitrary lines and fiddles with the magazines he knows from front to back as he waits for Jeonghan to not look like he's dealing with a killer headache. At one point, he offers him an aspirin, but Jeonghan politely declines with the promise that he's fine.

Joshua is re-alphabetizing the prescriptions when Jeonghan says, quietly, “We've changed a lot, haven't we?”

Joshua turns around and realizes that Jeonghan is eyeing him. It's that thoughtful look that Jeonghan seems to be getting more often lately. It's impossible to tell how long he has been staring, but with his unreadable expression, Joshua guesses that it must have been a while. Somehow, he’s not surprised.

They call each other best friends, but Jeonghan has always been hard for him to read.

The first time Joshua approached Jeonghan was in the school library, a crowded, chaotic place that had, for the first week of school, been all but deserted. Joshua had come to read. The first day back, he reasoned, meant first pick of all the popular, mainstream books that would spend the rest of the year cycling endlessly between hands and never making it back onto the shelf long enough for him to pluck. Strolling in and running his hands across the cracked and bruised spines at his leisure—that is, pretending that he was at an actual bookstore—was a bit of a guilty pleasure. No one to read for but himself.

Joshua had checked out five books and retreated to an out-of-the-way table in order to wrestle them into his backpack. He hadn't noticed that Jeonghan was already there, sound asleep. Even before the start of school, everybody knew about Jeonghan, the new transfer who immediately tried out for every sports team over the summer and, whether by dumb luck or poor planning or sheer force of will, made it onto almost all of them. If Joshua had been on any of the group chats, perhaps he would have known, too. But he wasn’t, and he wouldn’t discover this aspect of Jeonghan’s notoriety until much later. Their first meeting was just dumb luck and poor planning. Sheer force of will? Joshua isn’t so sure.

Jeonghan had slept in near-silence, the low hum of his breathing almost indistinguishable from the white noise of the old, rickety air conditioning system.

The school is older than he is. Its systems of maintaining homeostasis are ancient, the same automated processes that have kept its stubborn paper heart up and running for eons. Standing inside the mouth of it, faded olefin carpet and heavyset stacks, feels like a separation between self and setting, time and place. Joshua uses the library more than any other student he knows, but he is never sure if he is entirely comfortable inside it.

Evidently, Jeonghan has never had such reservations.

“You're, um,” Joshua had said back in the library, his thoughts stuttering as Jeonghan's soft snores gave way to blearily entertained eyes. He hadn’t even looked surprised.

It wasn't the first time he had talked to a peer of his own accord, but as Jeonghan woke up, there slid something deliberately challenging in the curve of his mouth that, without rhyme or reason, reminded Joshua of someone else.

His father was a man of science. One day, when Joshua was old enough to be trusted with not poking out his own eyes on accident, perhaps five, his father surprised him with a pack of litmus paper complete with pipettes. The color-coded key looked like a rainbow of Post-It notes. If it's red, it's an acid. If it's blue, it's a base. And all the colors in-between: orange for vinegar, yellow for rain . . . . He supposed that they must have tested something, and that his father must have waited for him to consult the key and asked him for the results, what is it, but all he remembers is holding the still-blank strip of paper in his little fingers, it's nothing.

That languid smile gave Joshua the feeling that Jeonghan was testing him to see how he would react. Jeonghan didn't offer to fill in the blank, content to let the move play out with his head still pillowed on his folded arms. His look was expectant, a charmed, unspoken prompt: “I'm . . . ?”

Finally, Joshua sealed the sentence, “You're getting drool on the table.”

Jeonghan's smile had widened exponentially. “Am I?”

Joshua’s mind slipped from his books. “Are you?”

It really is unfair, Joshua thinks even now, surrounded by the barren closing time of the clinic, how dazzling he is. Jeonghan isn’t smiling, only leaning against the excoriating wall and looking at Joshua as if the invisible weight of things isn’t there bearing down on his relaxed shoulders, and yet there's still something lofty about him that is always just out of reach.

Joshua removes himself from the reverie, lets go of the last prescription, and asks in a light response to Jeonghan's earlier statement, “Have we?”

Jeonghan shrugs. “I'd like to think so.”

Joshua hums noncommittally, and Jeonghan senses it.

“You don't think so?” Jeonghan asks, raising his eyebrows in invitation for a counterargument. There's something cordial and blithe about his voice that only seeps in when he is trying not to let his hurt show. Joshua keeps his expression neutral, fighting the worry out of his face. He knows this. For all his boisterous front, Jeonghan is the most sensitive one of them all.

“I think you still drool in your sleep,” Joshua eventually declares.

That makes Jeonghan smile microscopically.

When Joshua approaches the chair, out of things to do, Jeonghan pulls him in by the wrist. Joshua lands in the adjacent seat and tries to flip his hand around to slap Jeonghan back, but Jeonghan retracts his hand just as quickly. Joshua pins him with a curious, scrutinizing look, but Jeonghan doesn't seem to mind. His smile is wider now. Joshua can't help feeling happy at that.

Making a show of staring at the old wooden stairs on the opposite side of the room, Joshua slides his hand onto the armrest and waits. Catching onto the game immediately, Jeonghan sets his hand on top and pulls away as soon as Joshua tries to flip his palm up. Joshua's upturned palm meets open air. He makes a face, turns his palm down, closes his fingers over the armrest, and waits. This repeats until finally, Joshua gets better or Jeonghan gives in, and Joshua catches Jeonghan's hand by, in effect, lacing their fingers together. For someone who lost, Jeonghan looks remarkably content. He lightly bounces their linked hands up and down on the armrest. Joshua's knuckles bump against the armrest, which has warmed up over the course of their game. They must have been playing for a while, Joshua realizes idly, admiring their joined hands. Jeonghan comes to the same realization.

“Let's do something today,” Jeonghan says, juxtaposing it with the tickle of his hair on Joshua's neck as he lowers his head to Joshua's shoulder. Joshua leans into him just a little, just enough not to crush him under the weight of his head, listening as Jeonghan switches to playing with their fingers. “You have the rest of the afternoon off.”

Joshua makes a disbelieving noise against Jeonghan's hair.

“And I'm not in the mood for apps at the moment,” Jeonghan concedes, one of his hands stealthily wandering up to pinch at Joshua's ear. Joshua expertly tilts his head away. He's still waiting for his ears to heal around the studs he got last month, and that means keeping them clean.

Jeonghan knows this, of course, as he resettles and acts like nothing happened, but it doesn't stop him from trying, halfheartedly, and without looking, Joshua can feel the tired smile briefly lighting on his mouth like the glint of a coin at the bottom of a fountain. Sometimes, it seems like the more time they spend together, the less words they need.

“What do you say?”

“You're horrible,” Joshua rolls his eyes, letting out a long-suffering sigh. “Let's get it.”

Jun is less enthusiastic when the two of them show up at Claire's in the culmination of their afternoon on the town. To be fair, Jeonghan had laughingly forewarned that Jun might not even have a shift today, and to be fair, when they walked in, Jun's face lit up in greeting, but as soon as Joshua brought up the subject of getting another piercing, Jun's face shuttered. Jun has one of those megawatt smiles that shines for twelve hours a day. There's no inescapable gravitational pull to it, but it's effusive and omnipresent. When it disappears, it's like someone turned off the sun.

“No,” says Jun, looking shocked as soon as he says it, as if he didn't expect the words to come out of his mouth. Still, once his mind is resolved, he presses on with the full force of his insistence, even as Jeonghan's smile subsides at the edges, “It's been a month since you got your lobes pierced—your first piercings ever, actually—and now you want another one?”

“I can pay,” Joshua offers, pulling his Starbucks out of his mouth.

“No!” Jun exclaims, throwing his hands up momentarily. His manager levels him a hawk-eyed glare from the opposite side of the store, and he sighs and clenches a fistful of his hair before releasing it. “I mean, yes, but that's not what this is about.”

Jeonghan frowns. When he talks, Joshua feels the pleasant familiarity of his voice buzzing in his ear. Or maybe it's the sugar. Or the caffeine. He's training his eyes on Jun's reaction, but somehow, he is overly aware of the sound of Jeonghan changing posture, shifting from one leg to the other, tilting his chin up at Jun.  Joshua has grown so familiar with the deliberate challenge that comes with Jeonghan's character that he has almost forgotten about it until Jeonghan asks, simultaneously teasing and testing, “So what is this about?”

Jun drums his fingers on the counter he is manning. It's a slow day for the day before Thanksgiving. He turns to Joshua, imploring. “I'm just worried you're rushing into things.”

Joshua can taste the sweet foam from the seasonal Frappuccino. He licks his lips but doesn't feel like taking another sip.

“I want this,” he says with all the certainty of a simple world, raising his free hand with the index finger up. “Just one ear this time.”

It's Jun's turn to bite his lips, tugging, losing. “That doesn't make it any less of a piercing, you know.”

But he, too, gives up.

Joshua gets pierced in a second place, his left midear.

(Later, Jeonghan touches the shell of Joshua ear without wandering to the piercing and whispers, an undefinable strain in his voice, “You're not symmetrical anymore,” and simple, annoyed, seventeen-year-old Joshua doesn't understand but lets him keep his fingers there because Jeonghan complains when he is symmetrical and Jeonghan complains when he is not and Joshua wonders if there will ever be anything that can stay perfect for Jeonghan.)

  
  


 

 

 

The air in the classroom is dry and stale. Outside, it is raining for the first time in weeks. Joshua feels like his brain is dripping between his ears under the low hum of the heating. It reeks in the morning. All the air in the school is pushed up to their floor, all the body odor and unfiltered sewage and adolescent angst coalescing in a watery, omnipresent weight that clings to the edges of his head like irremediably-soaked clothes in the rain, rain, rain . . . the endless thrum on the windowsills and the hum of the old building . . . rain is falling . . . .

A frustratingly familiar crackle of paper dashes his thoughts. Joshua knows to expect it when a crumpled ball of looseleaf rebounds off the back of his head. He hears it hit the floor somewhere beyond the legs of his chair and makes no move to pick it up. Instead, he silently extends a hand backward, out of sight, and feels Jeonghan press another paper in his hand.

He reads it and pauses. Then he writes a response and returns it.

Joshua plays with his pen. The rain isn't stopping.

He hears when Jeonghan unfolds his answer on his desk and immediately crumples it up again.

“ _‘No’_?”

Jeonghan is asking from where he is cornering Joshua after class, the offending paper still in his hand. He hadn't let it go over the course of the entire period, and Joshua hadn't bothered to say anything, either. From all the crumpling it underwent in their two minutes of passing notes, it almost has as many tiny creases in it as the palm Jeonghan is holding it in. Jeonghan looks less frustrated and more bewildered, like the time Joshua told him to close his eyes and pinch his nose and had him taste test an apple and a potato. Jeonghan couldn't tell the difference, and he had sulked over it for a whole week.

Now, Jeonghan pinches his nose and tries again.

“It’s their first time performing at the New Year's Eve Eve Ball, and I happen to have an extra ticket,” Jeonghan says finally, dangling the offer like a carrot on a stick. Unbidden, a tempting smile slides across his mouth. “I heard that it's at a very hot venue these days.”

“Jeonghan, you don't even use tickets. It's literally in your basement.”

“And our heating works wonderfully, thank you very much,” Jeonghan says, smile glowing wider for a fleeting second before slowly flickering out. Jeonghan's smile is like a light bulb, except the light bulb keeps being changed, and  it takes Joshua months to realize that the light bulb he's looking at now isn't the same one he saw yesterday. Jeonghan picks at the edges of the battered paper, sucking nervously at his lip. “Seokmin is really excited to play for you.”

Joshua knows that this is Jeonghan's not-so-subtle attempt to guilt-trip him, and he hates that it's working. Seokmin is the genuinely nice kind of guy who would be really excited to play for his coworker's reclusive best friend even if Joshua could probably count all the times they spoke on one hand. He pushes it aside, remaining firm. He would really like a cigarette right about now, but if his finger twitches, it doesn't show. “I didn't ask him to play for me.”

Jeonghan is so quiet for a moment that even in the gradually-emptying hallway where they're are most likely going to be borderline-late for their next respective classes, Joshua swears he can hear the rain pounding on every last side of the school.

“Don't make this about Seokmin,” Jeonghan says, and there's an equal, unflinching firmness in his voice that throws Joshua off with its unexpected gravity.

When the light bulb is off, Joshua wonders about all the things he has been too dazzled to see.

All of Joshua's half-baked arguments fizzle on his tongue, suddenly feeling too petty and frivolous and naïve. He forgets, sometimes, all the things that come with Jeonghan's vast and shining social constellation. There's nothing concise, nothing concrete, no word or phrase he can latch onto in his vocabulary to frame the realization that the centers of their universes aren't where he thought they were. There's no dramatic pause, no overwhelming feeling of his world on overhaul, and yet, in this one defining way, everything is different, and he can't put his finger on it. It's raining, and Joshua's words are running dry. Maybe he was wrong in November. Maybe he needs words he can't find.

“I'll be there,” he promises, and Jeonghan nods, something in his expression relaxing at the promise.

His fingers are still fiddling with the unfixable paper.

Joshua thinks about it, Jeonghan's absentminded hands toying with the wrinkled paper, even when he is walking up to Jeonghan's house hours later with an old, battered umbrella over his head. He had excavated it from the very back of a storage closet and whacked off the dust in big moth-colored clouds, lighter and heavier than smoke. Rain hits the dome without forgiveness, resonating down to his hand on the hooked handle. It hasn't relented all day.

Every last window of Jeonghan's house is a rectangle of warm yellow light, but the exterior looks almost blue in the rain. December isn't cold here, but Joshua feels like it is. Jeonghan lives in what is, by all accounts, a normal neighborhood, no psychic neighbors or old rival practices, just two long, neat rows of two-story houses lining each side of a street where the speed limit is twenty-five miles per hour. There are no strobe lights. There is no rhythm that spreads into the street aside from the rain. For one night, it looks, by all counts, like a normal house in a normal neighborhood, if not brighter than all the rest. The front porch light is on, and as Joshua stands under its glow, fighting to close his dripping umbrella, he realizes that Jeonghan's house has never looked homier.

Joshua is easing out of his shoes outside when Jeonghan appears, leaning in the doorway and looking like it’s the normalest thing in the world. Instead of an umbrella, he holds a bottle of beer. Joshua wonders if he's ever without one at these parties. Jeonghan languidly sizes him up. “You know, it's easier if you set the umbrella down first.”

“You think?” Joshua sighs in retort, balancing an umbrella-wielding arm on the porch railing as he pulls off his soaked shoes. He had forgotten he was still holding it.

Jeonghan just raises his eyebrows and holds out his hand, and Joshua relinquishes the umbrella. Jeonghan makes no other move to help, content to observe as Joshua makes quick work of removing his shoes the rest of the way. When he looks up, Jeonghan graciously returns his umbrella. Joshua's fingers brush against the bottle in the process. It's cold. Jeonghan's skin is warm.

Joshua would really like a cigarette right about now.

He's so disoriented that he almost walks up the stairs before Jeonghan pulls on his sleeve with a mildly amused smile, guiding him to the basement. Right. Joshua had forgotten about that in his reflex to flee the party. Not that there are too many people lingering on the ground floor in the first place; it's emptier than usual, a few wet sneakers and rain boots haphazardly abandoned by the entrance, most of their owners having already descended to Jeonghan's “hot venue”. Jeonghan follows his glance as Joshua reluctantly lets go of the banister. When he sees the sopping shoes strewn in small puddles on the wooden floor, he sighs knowingly. The smile turns a tad ironic.

“Teenagers,” he remarks wryly, meeting Joshua's eyes as if they're in on a secret. There's something simmering there that Joshua can't put his finger on. Jeonghan's gaze drifts to Joshua's hand and rests there for a long moment, as if contemplating something, but at the last, he seems to think better of it. He shakes his head, and Joshua feels a loss of heat when Jeonghan's eyes decide to focus on the shoes instead. “I'll clean it up when you're eighteen.”

Joshua just nods.

It shouldn't be so surprising that for all the time they spend at each other's houses, Joshua rarely goes into Jeonghan's basement. Despite how disarrayed things tend to become on the ground floor, the basement is where most of the action happens during Jeonghan's parties, and thus, Joshua goes out of his way to avoid it. The only times he ventures down there is in the bright light of day when Jeonghan is cleaning up the remnants of a party the night before, and the first time he saw the spilled drinks and Silly String, the strewn napkins and sticky shoeprints, Joshua had quickly decided that the basement wasn't for him. Occasionally, Joshua joins Jeonghan in the basement to help him clean, but other than those hours when they're shoving all the debris they can fit into trash bags the size of his arms, there has always been this unspoken agreement that what happens in the basement stays in the basement.

Joshua doesn't realize that his body has tensed until Jeonghan places a hand, the one that's still holding a bottle of beer, between his shoulderblades as they file down the stairs. It's a gesture meant to be soothing, and part of it is, but part of it flashes hot and cold at the same time, and Joshua almost misses the next step in surprise. When he catches himself, Jeonghan has retracted his hand, but the nervous anticipation has settled into something that feels less like Joshua is about to roll down the rest of the stairs, and he lets himself breathe. If Jeonghan notices the slip—there’s no way he wouldn't, and Joshua knows it—he makes no comment.

Jeonghan's basement looks dauntingly spacious with so many high schoolers inside. He had forgone the strobe lights in favor of using the built-in ceiling lights and some miscellaneous lamps. While it's a strange effect, seeing all these Solo-cup-wielding regular strangers milling around in the bright light that resembles day, Joshua appreciates the way it softens the setting; the crowd seems more subdued than usual, content to wander around and graze at the snack table. There's clamor but no chaotic music, no confusing darkness, and Joshua knows that Jeonghan's choice in illumination was intentional.

Seokmin and the rest of his band, which consists of Soonyoung and a popular underclassman named Boo Seungkwan, are currently setting up in the back. Seokmin happens to look up precisely as Joshua and Jeonghan reach the bottom of the stairs, and his mouth breaks into a gummy smile. He waves the hand that isn't currently tangled in the long cord for the microphone. They wave back. It's hard not to soften at Seokmin's wholehearted enthusiasm. Joshua's mother has always told him that it's hard to find people like that, but that's why we look.

Jeonghan tugs on Joshua's sleeve again, inclining his head toward an empty space along the wall, and they go there to stand, comfortably out of the way, and it's obviously for Joshua's benefit, but somehow, it makes Joshua frustrated. Jeonghan goes to get a snack, and Joshua's eyes wander to the electrical outlet in this forgotten corner of the room. Most of the other sockets are already stuffed with phone chargers, but this one, for some reason or other, has gone ignored. Like a forgotten memory, Joshua pictures the Wallflowers plug that has been plugged in his room since October and wonders how it would fit in here.

The band finishes setting up and turns on the microphone to get everyone's attention. Jeonghan returns with two plastic red cups in lieu of his beer bottle, sidling up to Joshua and offering him one as naturally as ever. Seokmin happily introduces the band as BooSeokSoon, gesturing at Seungkwan and Soonyoung appropriately; asks if the crowd is ready (yes); and dedicates the song to Joshua, which draws the aforementioned a decent amount of curious looks. Joshua studiously ignores these by keeping his eyes on the band as Seokmin cues the music.

Joshua has only ever heard Seokmin's music through a set of walls. Being down here is a different story. This song isn't as beat-heavy as the sets Joshua is used to hearing in the vibrations of the house. It's a softer, more melodic piece that makes him forget to drink, the cup dangling in his hand. Seokmin sings steadily into Joshua's eyes from all the way across the room as if there is no room between the place where he starts and the music ends. Next to him, Jeonghan downs Hawaiian Punch like it's water. When the first song fades out with a final chord from Seungkwan's keyboard, Seokmin trots over with the microphone and together, the three of them wish him a deafening happy birthday. The crowd lets out a cheer, though by now, most of them are too preoccupied with the band to give Joshua a second look, and Joshua appreciates it. There's a mellow energy in the room, more laidback than Jeonghan's usual parties. It's warm, and Joshua realizes that for once, Jeonghan's party feels more like a community than a passing craze.

When Joshua finally looks over, Jeonghan is avoiding his gaze, and the punch has made his lips redder than usual.

“I would really like some more punch right about now,” Jeonghan murmurs, the movement barely noticeable as Seokmin announces the next song. He doesn't look directly at Joshua in favor of studying the pink-stained rim of his cup with something ruminative in his eyes, but he doesn't seem to be surprised by Joshua's staring. Jeonghan's sullenness comes as a surprise. There's something bothering him, but Joshua can't read all of it, and he's not sure if Jeonghan would be willing to tell him. Sighing and letting the empty cup fall to his side, Jeonghan says, “Let's go upstairs.”

Joshua wouldn't mind staying for the next song, but he can tell that Jeonghan is heading upstairs either way, so he agrees.

Distractedly, Jeonghan eases Joshua's cup out of his hand and stacks it inside his own empty one on their way up. Hosting is a habit to him. This time, Jeonghan is the one who stumbles at the top of the stairs, reaching for a seventeenth step that isn't there. The punch sloshes dangerously inside the cup, a red little wave, and Joshua unthinkingly reaches out to steady him with both hands and whacks Jeonghan with his umbrella in the process. Jeonghan lets out a low chuckle after he has successfully braced himself on the walls around the stairs with the assurances that “I'm fine, Shua. I'm fine.” Joshua reluctantly lets go of Jeonghan—there’s something tense in  his shoulders—but silently marvels at the umbrella.

Somehow, he hasn't set it down this whole time. How could he forget he was holding something so big?

He doesn't realize that they've stopped in the foyer and not on the second floor until Jeonghan is throwing on his Lafuma jacket, the one his parents got him for Christmas, and pulling on his shoes. The first time Joshua saw it, he had asked him when he would possibly wear something like that in LA, and Jeonghan had shrugged and said “night.”

“We're ditching your party?” Joshua raises his eyebrows when Jeonghan pushes the front door open. Joshua's Vans are still next to the doormat, looking considerably drier. When Jeonghan pins him with an unimpressed look, Joshua adds, tactfully, “But we'll miss the encore.”

“The one time I let you into the basement,” Jeonghan lets out an incredulous snort. Standing under the porch light in a quilted waterproof jacket in what is 50° weather minimum, his back to the neighborhood night, Jeonghan looks like he's standing in a whole other world compared to the cooling warmth of the threshold. “Shua, are you coming or what?”

Joshua closes the door behind him so that they're both standing outside. Jeonghan's heating really does work fine, but he knows not to push it with the colder air outside, even if it is in the low fifties at worst. It's strange, standing in his socks in front of Jeonghan. They've always been more or less the same height, but with his shoes on, Jeonghan stands an inch taller. Joshua didn't even bring a coat. Standing in front of him makes him feel strangely vulnerable. There's no layer Joshua can pull between them.

Jeonghan breaks eye contact to glance uncertainly at the door, and Joshua eyes his oblivious Vans and thinks about how he could really go for a cigarette right about now. For the nth time, Joshua hadn't realized he was staring. His face feels hot, and he explains it away as shame, ignoring the lingering feeling of something else hiding in the mix.

Joshua breaks the silence by switching topics.

“Where are we going?”

“Santa Monica,” Jeonghan snatches the opening immediately, stretching and walking toward the car. He seems glad to have something definite to do instead of standing around on the front porch. He slides a hand along the railing, smooth but slipping. “The pier looks positively lovely at night.”

Joshua silently descends the porch to join him just in time to see Jeonghan fumble through his pockets and let out another incredulous laugh. Joshua reaches him, and Jeonghan's hand is clapped to his forehead. There's a self-deprecating smile on his mouth that doesn't reach his closed eyes.

“I forgot my keys.”

Jeonghan slides his hand up, combing it once through his hair, and lets out a long-suffering sigh. His eyes open to meet Joshua's, and there are so many things in his eyes that Joshua can't possibly read them all in the span of a universe, let alone the span of a moment. Fondness. Ruefulness. Sadness. Happiness. Fleetingness.

“You're drunk,” Joshua thinks with an unreadable pang.

“Let's ditch it some other way,” Joshua says instead, gently pulling Jeonghan by the arm. Somehow, Jeonghan transitions the gesture into holding hands. “We can go somewhere other than a world-famous pier with twenty-four-seven operation.”

“Where?” Jeonghan asks feebly, perhaps tiredly, and at the same time sounding like the child version of Jeonghan that Joshua has never and probably will never have met.

They end up on Jeonghan's back porch.

The porch light is off, and they're keeping it that way. No one in the party, even if they changed a glance out the bright windows, would notice two boys sitting next to each other against the vast vacuum of light. There's a faint prickle on his back where he can feel the yellow light of Jeonghan's house, but other than that, it is cool outside, and Joshua finds himself relaxing as he breathes it in. At some point, Jeonghan shed his coat and started using it as a blanket in his lap, toying with the sleeves. So close but so far from the party, it's hard to see much of anything beyond the porch. There is so much light pollution, and their eyes are so slow to adjust. Joshua doesn't look over, but he knows they're both facing the stars and waiting for the gray sky to separate into black night and white light.

“A long fucking time,” Jeonghan breathes out.

“What?”

“The stars,” Jeonghan says, and he's gesturing at the sky that refuses to reveal them, but Joshua knows that he's talking about a set of stars that is closer to Earth but equally out of reach. The ones that are pasted to the ceiling of Joshua's bedroom in a careful rendition of the summer sky. The ones that appear over Joshua's head every single night while the stars that exist out in the great wide open can't be bothered to show up. “It took me a long fucking time.”

Joshua hums. Jeonghan continues.

“I had to bring my laptop and everything for reference. It took a shit ton of tabs and a shit ton of time for a little shit like you. I learned a lot, actually, though not of my own volition. Did you know that stars move?” Jeonghan asks, then pauses abruptly, as if he has said something that he hadn't wanted to. When Joshua gives him a wordless look of concern, Jeonghan shakes his head. “I didn't. I thought they stayed in the same place forever. This is going to sound so shitty, but I never so much as looked up until you made me.”

Jeonghan goes quiet. Joshua can't stop staring at him.

“I'm sorry I'm drunk,” Jeonghan says.

“I'm sorry I smoke,” Joshua says.

After a while, Jeonghan cracks another smile.

“I'm sorry we're apologizing for who we are.”

Joshua bites his lip but says it anyway. “I'm sorry there are parts of who I am that I can't show you.”

“You're not the only one,” Jeonghan exhales, and it sounds like he's talking about something else that Joshua can't wrap his head around. Joshua wants to ask but doesn't.

He doesn't realize that the pause has gotten so long until Jeonghan speaks again.

“You can't save us from change, Joshua.”

_That's random, Jeonghan._

But it doesn't take a translator to know that what he means is “You can't save _me_ from change, Joshua.” There's something huge shifting in Jeonghan's universe, but Joshua's naked eyes are not powerful enough to see what it is. He only has all the observable effects to go by: the way Jeonghan recedes into himself in their conversations, the way Jeonghan looks when the band plays, the way Jeonghan downs a beer and not one but two tall cups of spiked punch and would have gone for a third. Jeonghan stopped his school pranks around the peak of application periods and didn't pick them up again after application closed. He doesn't talk about himself anymore, and Joshua realizes with dawning horror that Jeonghan barely ever talked about himself in the first place. What's his favorite color? What TV shows does _he_ watch? Joshua knows that he is an oblivious person, but he had always clung to the knowledge that at least he knew his best friend. Now, he's not sure if he even has that much.

Instead of saying all this, Joshua forces down the swell of panic and drags himself back to the present moment. He takes a soft breath.

“You think I don't know that?”

“I don't know. There are a lot of things you don't say. You know that.”

Joshua does.

They've been sitting so still, waiting for the stars. When Joshua moves to reach into his pocket, the sound is disproportionately loud. He can feel Jeonghan, his best friend, this stranger, silently eyeing him in the darkness as he pulls out a box of cigarettes. It's dark, but Joshua can see it all with perfect clarity. Joshua runs his thumb across letters he can't feel, warnings he can't remove. Joshua thinks about his friends at the drug store who give him discounts. Joshua thinks about his reserved space on Jeonghan's back porch that no one has ever seen. Joshua thinks about the little box with a smooth finish that makes it so slippery in his hand.

And throws it all into the grass over the horizon.

Jeonghan is staring.

“What did you do that for?”

Joshua smooths his hands.

“Sometimes, the things we like aren't the best for us.”

Another pause.

“You littered in my backyard.”

This makes Joshua laugh.

“It's called a metaphor, Jeonghan. I'll pick it up.”

“Damn right you will. You know you could have aimed for the trash can, right?”

“You’re the athlete.”

“. . . You forgot there was a trash can, didn't you.”

“No!”

“Shua.”

“Okay, maybe.”

“ _Shua_.”

“Okay, fine! Damn right I did. There. Parallelism. Happy?”

“It's still so weird when you curse.”

“Says you. You haven't cursed all month until today, and even I've noticed.”

“You did?”

“Did you think I wouldn't?”

“You have a tendency to be rather oblivious.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Captain Oblivious.”

“See, this is why I like Seokmin more than you.”

“Do you?”

“. . . Fuck off and let me be drunk for a bit.”

“Sorry.”

“There are too many sorries and not enough stars.”

“‘Starries’ would rhyme.”

“What am I, a five-year-old?”

“Does it matter if you're a kid at heart?”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“You're still holding your umbrella.”

“Oh. Shit. You're right.”

“I have a tendency to be right.”

“Has it been here the whole time?”

“That would be an affirmative, Captain Oblivious.”

“I thought you didn't like my pun.”

“I never said that.”

“And I got distracted because I distinctly remember asking you about your swearing.”

“Maybe I've been starting to go PG.”

“The great Yoon Jeonghan, getting soft.”

“Maybe some people make me want to go soft.”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“. . . He invited me to hang out with the band tomorrow.”

“Who, Seokmin?”

“Yeah, Seokmin. Soonyoung and Seungkwan will be there, too.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you going?”

“Yeah.”

“Is there anything you can say other than 'yeah’?”

“I—Wow, that's so tacky even for you. Yes, I can say things other than 'yeah.’”

“I do my best.”

“So that's what they're calling overused jokes nowadays.”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“Have fun with the band. They're nice guys, and I'm glad you dragged me out today to see them. It was—It was nice.”

“Thanks.”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“. . . Back to your umbrella.”

“Back to my umbrella.”

“You haven't let go of it all night.”

“I haven't?”

“Yeah. It's a new level of obliviousness even for you.”

“Oh. It's just something that I picked up at the clinic.”

“The clinic has umbrellas?”

“It was in a closet. Toward the back. I didn't know we had it, either.”

“You're a very forgetful one, Mr. Hong.”

“. . . The umbrella, I don't know where it came from. I can't remember if it was my father's.”

“Does it matter if you've made it yours?”

“You have a funny way of wording things when you're drunk.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It sounds like you.”

“. . .”

“It's a compliment, Jeonghan. You're one of the best people I know.”

“. . . Oh.”

“Yeah. But sometimes, I wish it didn't take alcohol to be you.”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“You threw your cigarettes off the porch.”

“Thanks, Captain Obvious.”

“Ugh, enough with the captainship, nerd. I'm giving you an opening to talk about your metaphor.”

“Okay. Give me a second.”

“Thinking?”

“Mm. You mentioned the stars earlier.”

“Wow, that's not random at all.”

“You mentioned how our perspectives on them change depending on where we are. Ancient sailors used the stars to navigate.”

“I'm starting to think that you're just a humanities kind of guy . . . and that this isn't actually a metaphor.”

“I'm getting to it. You know another thing about ancient sailors?”

“Joshua, I know nothing about ancient sailors.”

“They thought the world was flat, and if you sailed all the way to the edge, you would fall off the face of the Earth. Nothing existed after the horizon. Things were just . . . finite. Over.”

“. . . Sitting here with me feels like sitting on the edge of the world?”

“Yeah. We can't see anything past it, can we?”

“It's looking relatively lightless in my backyard, yes.”

“And throwing that box over the edge . . . is like saying it's not a finite thing. It's not a trap with no exit. It's not something that I can do for a year or two and have vanish without a trace, because yes, I'm going to pick it up later and put it in the trash can that I totally forgot about, but I don't have to keep holding onto it forever. It doesn't have to be this big, dramatic, defining aspect of my existence. I'm not holding onto it anymore. It's shit, and I'm sick of defining myself by all the shitty things that come with the package.”

“Wow. Here I was thinking you just wanted an excuse to throw something. You know, like a massive 'fuck you.’”

“That too. It was pretty satisfying.”

“It’s still not a metaphor.”

“Damn.”

“But you’re still holding your umbrella.”

“I guess I am.”

Joshua looks up and lets out an incredulous laugh. Jeonghan looks at him. The stars are there, ever so slightly.

“What're you laughing at?”

“It stopped raining.”

It stopped raining when the party started, and Joshua had looked up without seeing it this whole time.

Joshua finally returns his gaze to meet Jeonghan's, and there's that conflicted look he can't decipher. Letting the words go, Jeonghan coaxes his hand off of the umbrella and gives it a soft squeeze, and Joshua wonders if Jeonghan has always been as puzzled as he is.

“Happy New Year's Eve Eve, Joshua.”

_Happy birthday_.

  
  
  


 

 

In the middle of January, the month of new beginnings, a high school senior bursts into Claire's and almost runs straight into the counter, willfully ignoring or entirely oblivious to the shocked stares that follow in his wake. Jun blinks and is faced with wide, frantic eyes. He clearly recognizes the kid leaning unsteadily on the check-out counter he wiped this morning. In another universe, the one in which he is not screaming for air, Joshua is touched at being remembered, but Joshua's breaths are jagged, and he can't seem to catch it again.

_You're not the only one._

It's the day that Joshua discovers that his best friend is dating someone else, and in another universe, he knows that it shouldn't hurt so much, but in this one, it does.

His best friend is dating the nicest person in the world, and Joshua could never, would never come in the way of that.

How could he measure up?

No balance. No symmetry.

_Why do I need to sleep when I'm here with my favorite person? Honestly, Shua, you're such a stubborn little shit._

“Piercing,” Joshua gasps.

He says it again when he has gulped down a few more breaths and Jun still hasn't moved. They stare at each other, Joshua with his unseeing eyes and Jun with his all-seeing ones. Jun looks grim, as if he had known what was coming but took no pleasure out of it. Stern, almost.

_Eighteen can't come soon enough._

“Joshua, you need to slow down and breathe. I can't pierce you while you're like this.”

_Your lungs are shit._

“But you will?”

Jun will.

Joshua barely feels the needle punch through his right midear. It doesn't feel like symmetry. He doesn't know what he thought it would feel like, but it feels like nothing.

_Have you ever thought of getting a piercing?_

(Later, the new couple passes Joshua while he is on his way to class, and Jeonghan stares at where a rose-shaped stud graces Joshua's midear, and Joshua stares at where Jeonghan's hand holds Seokmin's because he never figured out the heat he had felt when those fingers had always held his. He has never felt less symmetrical.)

_. . . You know it’s not going to be that easy, right?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Joshua did properly dispose of the box later. Don't litter.)
> 
> Random Checklist:  
> \- Did you check out the super blood wolf moon last night?  
> \- Did you check out Seventeen's comeback?  
> \- Did you check on yourself today?  
> Take care out there.


	3. Helix (1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A SIDE STORY IN THE SUMMARY:  
> Joshua is eating cereal in the waiting room. His arm is starting to cramp from keeping the bowl steady, and he leans his elbow on the armrest before it gives, idly stirring the milk. It's a slow morning, and he had pulled the television out on its old, rickety wheels for some much-needed entertainment. The half-asleep clients turn their faces toward it, blank, like sunflowers following the light.
> 
> _This Monday saw an unprecedented amount of rain as the storm system moved through the state of California . . ._
> 
> Joshua wonders how Jeonghan is doing. He's eighteen, but he doesn't feel like he has changed. Just his age. It feels superficial, somehow, like he’s a stand-in for someone he is not. He wonders if this is what Jeonghan has been feeling since October. The spoon scrapes the side of the bowl, and Joshua glances up to see if anyone else heard. Just him.
> 
> _. . . I mean, it's always congested here in LA, but traffic was at a complete standstill. We're talking . . ._
> 
> Someone grumbles something about Southern California and the rain. Joshua keeps eating his breakfast.
> 
> _Now, you don't see a storm like that every day, but it happens . . ._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly, a big fear of mine, and I would imagine a lot of other creators, is that I put things out there that no one is going to notice. That I'm going to say something, and there is just going to be silence. Weirdly, I didn't feel so bad about it when I wrote the first chapter of this fic. It didn't scare me so much for this one. When the second chapter was posted and suddenly there were comments, I was awed. I love listening. I'm glad I kept going. I'm glad I finished. That's the scariest part. August, September, October; November, December, January; and now, February, March, and April.
> 
> Thank you for listening, too. It means a lot.  
> .  
> .  
> .  
> So. Here we are.

Joshua is exiting the classroom, and Jeonghan is stopping him there. The other students, mostly juniors and seniors, sneak him a few indiscreet glances on their way out. He is the Yoon Jeonghan, after all, and he doesn't bother to return their curiosity. He's leaning against the wall just outside the door, idly rolling his neck, and it's clear from his annoyance that he's waiting for Joshua, who lingers inside with his backpack half-on, clutching uselessly at the strap. Joshua hadn’t known that Jeonghan knew his classes. The hallmark of knowing someone is knowing how to avoid them. It hasn’t been a week, and Joshua has failed.

Jeonghan doesn’t close the door behind him, but he walks in with long strides and leans on the counter near one of the eight sinks in the science lab. There’s a black-and-white poster of Watson and Crick and their original double-helical model of DNA plastered on the wall just past his perch. It’s strange seeing Jeonghan inside this classroom. It’s strange seeing Jeonghan. Joshua steps back into the classroom and lets his backpack fall to the floor, listening. Jeonghan is taking his time, looking everywhere but Joshua before finally pinning him with his words.

“You can’t stay mad at me forever,” Jeonghan warns. The blinds are open. The classroom is lit by soft February sunlight. Joshua looks at him. His hair is dyed blond. It matches. When Joshua says nothing, Jeonghan sighs and steps off the counter, away from him. Sunlight takes over the space between them. Jeonghan glances at him once, and his eyes flash with something unplaceable. “You know, if you’re mad for too long, I could always leave.”

But Joshua doesn’t feel mad. He’s dumbly cradling one strap of his backpack in his hand, its weight unnoticeable on the ground, and he doesn’t feel mad, but at the same time, he doesn’t know what he can say to that.

Jeonghan leaves—

 

Joshua's confounded. His mother comes by his room every now and then and patiently asks him about the state of his desk, and he finds his eyes wandering to the tiny, delicate fragrance plug that has been slowly working its magic on his room. On his trips to the mall, which have been declining with alarming rapidity without Jeonghan to grin and pull him there by the wrists, Joshua stops by Bath & Body Works to buy refills when Jeonghan is off. Occasionally, he sees Seokmin there, and the latter always tries to engage with him at the cash register, grasping at every last conversational straw in the average high schooler's pocket with an energy and brilliance that rivals the sun. Somehow, it never fails to make Joshua's face go hot, feeling less shame and more of an equally inexplicable mortification, and his typical exit involves a hastily-mumbled thank you and the prickling feeling that if he had grown up with a friend in Seokmin, then maybe he could have been someone entirely different.

Once, he passes Soonyoung at his old kiosk, and the latter hopefully inquires whether he wants to buy more stress balls. Eyes twinkling like a proper salesman, Soonyoung holds up at least ten of them in offerance, and, stricken by the physical remnants of so many past perusals of the mall, Joshua almost bawls on the spot. He still has the minuscule stress ball from one September afternoon on the corner of his desk, its counterpart possibly or possibly not still in Jeonghan's possession. The incident frustrates him. It's a souvenir that he had been so close to forgetting entirely, and now he never will.

The rest of Joshua's room looks, on the surface, fine. The stubborn, under-his-skin smell of smoke is starting to become no more egregious than a fitted bed sheet, a thin but clinging layer that can only be reached if someone peels away the perfume first. His mother's examinations of his room are too cursory for her to do much olfactory excavation, Joshua surmises, but for some reason, he finds himself not wanting to take on the risk of regressing to the summer days of electric fans and thick gray indoor clouds, whether it's because he legitimately wants to clean up his act or have an acceptable excuse to continue using the fragrance plug. She's busy. He's fine. It's just his desk.

He has, over the course of several months, amassed a small trove of earrings in that same corner of his desk, half-hidden in the shadow of his aunt's bamboo folding fan. Sighing, he picks up the sail-like crescent and closes it with both hands, watching the stiff accordion folds align into one bar. Jeonghan has always opened it so easily, but Joshua keeps learning that the fan is heftier than it looks. Older, too. He wonders what his aunt saw in him, her nephew that she has never seen in person, to send something like that all the way across the ocean. He sets it aside and returns his focus to the earrings. “Trove” is a generous way of putting it. It's a small collection at most, but in the helplessly-skewed scale of his imagination, the earrings seem to weigh a ton apiece. His piercings are still there, still fresh even if they feel heavier, like they've been there a lot longer. He sees phantoms of Jeonghan everywhere: around the handle of the fan, on the arm of his couch, beyond the reach of his bean bag, over the fallen college brochures of the summer, under the light of the sun, in the holes of his ears. He always said the clinic was haunted, but in this new kind of emptiness, he's starting to think that it's just him.

Joshua thinks, sometimes, that living in the clinic is like living in an apartment that has been vacated by history. Here he is, standing in an apartment of his mind that is abruptly alone except for a single ghost that has managed to encompass everything in his room at once.

Joshua exhales again, looking up at the ceiling of plastic stars. They look so cheesy, almost tacky, as if daylight is trying its hardest to make a mockery of them, and still he can't bring himself to touch them or take them down. Thinking about closing that distance between him and the unreachable makes his chest spin with vertigo and nausea.

One time, Joshua took Jeonghan to Six Flags.

He really needs to get out of his head.

Less than twenty minutes later, Joshua is lingering on Jeonghan's front porch debating whether to ring the doorbell. It's not something that he has had to go through the motions of thinking about before. He had never realized the intimacy of being on someone's back porch until he found himself standing like a living ghost at the very front of Jeonghan's house all over again, having lost it. Go back to start. Do not pass Go. If he needed any proof of their estrangement, this is it. He could be anybody, standing on the front porch of anybody, a knotted feeling in his chest as he admires the lavender that never seems to stop blooming, gorging richly on the sunny Southern California weather. Jeonghan's mother gardens. The lavender has always been his favorite, its scent airy and pervasive. It's almost better than cigarettes, if he can get past the punch of the renewed realization that it has been a long, long time since he's smelled it, this suburban paradise. Shit. Joshua is never going to be able to smell smoke or lavender again without some scintilla of Yoon Jeonghan, and that's the saddest thought he has had all day.

Finally, he rings it, and two voices sound on the other side, jockeying to respond. When the door opens, a girl is standing there, only a few inches shorter than Joshua but a few years younger. She frowns at him like he's a chewed-up wad of someone else's bubblegum that has been dropped on their doorstep, closing the door with something akin to disappointment, but Joshua can hear her shouting something to Jeonghan anyway. _It's for you_.

It's another long moment before the door opens again, and Jeonghan is there, holding onto the knob like it's the only thing keeping him from falling over the threshold. He doesn't look surprised to see Joshua, but he doesn't look welcoming, either. It's not just a feeling in his chest. Something lodges in Joshua's throat. Jeonghan has never looked at him like that before, not like they were strangers, not like they didn't know each other, not like they couldn't trust each other. But then, it was Joshua who managed to avoid his best friend for the remainder of January and neglected to break his self-imposed isolation even after their meeting in the science classroom. If they can barely recognize each other after so many weeks, whose fault is it? If it only took that long to dislodge their friendship, who are they to call themselves best friends?

Jeonghan doesn't say anything, doesn't smile, but has the mercy to raise his eyebrows, and Joshua is relieved because he knows him enough to know this much, even if it's not overtly encouraging in itself. _What do you want_?

“We never made it to Season 5,” Joshua manages to squeeze out, and with that unspoken offer thrown out into the open, his chest is still aching but no longer constricted. His heart is hammering with an urgency that he cannot comprehend, like a caged bird that he cannot calm.

That is, until the glint of recognition in Jeonghan's eyes causes the panic to rush out of him at the drop of a dime. His English teacher mentioned once that the ability to stop on a dime was a source of pride for the ancient automobile driver and that the drop of a hat used to signal the start of a fight, a single, mundane signal for all hell to hold still or break loose, and posited that the drop of a dime was a corruption of the two. Joshua feels like that now, like his momentum has left him at an unprecedentedly short stopping distance, like the breath has sped dizzyingly out of him by inertia and like he is fighting for an unidentified something at the same time. Because Jeonghan still knows him enough to know what he means, too. It's not a new ache, it's an old one, and Joshua is reminded that they're always so close yet so far in too many uncountable ways. Maybe the problem isn't that something changed. Maybe it's that nothing did.

But facing each other across the threshold, the changes are as undeniable as the samenesses. Joshua wavers, uncertain, unable to settle on a revelation.

Jeonghan widens the doorway. “Come in,” he gives.

Relieved, Joshua removes his shoes and follows Jeonghan into the house. The picturesque sunny day is closed outside. He anticipates Jeonghan to veer up the stairs, but instead, Jeonghan walks straight past them, headed for the sequestered living room on the ground floor. There's the same sense of loss again as the steps vanish from sight, then a quiet nostalgia as they pass the wall under the stairs, which is speckled with pictures of Jeonghan and his sister throughout the years—a tiny Jeonghan tugging on his shoes in the moments before he leaves for his first day at a private kindergarten, his baby sister watching curiously from the safe clutches of an armchair that would be left behind on that side of the ocean along with all their other furnishings; an artsy Jeonghan, the name, etched inch-deep into the sands of Santa Monica; a grinning high school Jeonghan clasping hands with Joshua at a baseball game in which he had scored a home run and still lost, but he was so happy, and Joshua had forgotten all about it, that game, that pure, elated smile, that grinning high school Joshua, so detached from the one walking down the hall at present—a lane of memories threading through the heart of the house.

“I heard you got into the University of Washington,” Joshua comments by way of conversation. He thinks they're getting used to this kind of distance, like the brittle line of a tin-can telephone that might inevitably one day snap. Jeonghan gives him a sidelong glance, too short for its name.

“Is that what they're saying now?” he asks breezily, and Joshua doesn't like this game, doesn't like the studiously nonchalant curl to Jeonghan's mouth, as if this is a front they need now. Playing strangers is no fun. “Since when did you listen to rumors?”

“Since when did you not?”

And with that, any other remains of the illusion that nothing has happened since the day that Joshua met Jeonghan so long ago are vanished, too. The invisible and unheard, odorless and untouchable erase marks that have decorated their history for the past weeks have been called on their bluffs. Joshua and Jeonghan aren't the same people they were junior year, and none of Joshua's lame insistences could ever change that.

“Your sister grew,” Joshua comments.

“Did she?”

“Might even be getting taller than you.”

Jeonghan laughs. “Never.”

On the living room couch, a spacious, sprawling thing, the stylish square pillows are mysteriously gone. They're not the only missing decorations. The coffee table looks cleaner, and the fluted bowl of potpourri is also nowhere to be seen. Even the television stand has not been spared, the smaller appliances from the stereo to the Wii to the old DVD player leaving Lego-shaped spaces in their vacated spaces. The bilingual bookshelves in the back have been replaced by a series of cardboard boxes, some of them already taped shut, others showing flashes of steady hardcover spines and loyal paperbacks. Joshua is shocked by the sight, feeling the skin around his eyes tightening with a flare of alarm, a little horrified because he has the distinct feeling that he has walked in on Jeonghan's house halfway through a transformation, and there are only so many things that this much packing could mean. But that's impossible; he has heard nothing from Jeonghan. If something big was happening, wouldn't he know? Joshua's brainwaves are battling each other, a cognitive dissonance so loud that he barely hears it when Jeonghan sits on the barren couch and turns on the television, fishing around for Netflix. Joshua is scared to ask, and Jeonghan is staring fixedly at the screen.

“I'm going to meet Seokmin in a few hours, so I'm warning you right now that I might have to leave in the middle of a cliffhanger,” Jeonghan is saying, the teasing edge to his voice coming to him habitually. The remote is deceptively lax in his hand. Joshua knows.

“Jeonghan—”

“Are you sure you want to start from episode one?” Jeonghan asks, doing a scroll through the number of episodes in Season 4 of _Sailor Moon_ , but even the familiar titles do nothing to soothe him because Jeonghan's house is being gutted and Jeonghan isn't fucking listening. “There are always so many episodes in the shows you like, you know that?”

“Jeonghan, you can't possibly be taking all these books to—”

“Joshua,” Jeonghan cuts in, his eyes sharp and pleading. “Let's just watch the show, okay?”

Joshua swallows hard, barely hearing himself say “okay” over the heavy sound of something dropping down his chest cavity.

They pass a few hours lost in themselves, in _Sailor Moon_ , in outer space, in space on earth. At one point, Jeonghan's father visits the adjacent kitchen and mentions how he hasn't seen Joshua in a while and asks if he could make them anything to eat, and the two of them politely decline. Jeonghan's father says how good it is that they are spending this time together, the sentiment removed but real, and when he leaves after this brief interaction, the fresh wave of self-consciousness that has descended over the couch is almost mortifying, and Joshua can feel them both redoubling their efforts to distract themselves. And it works, actually. For a few hours, they are on a different earth, a distant Tokyo, another dimension. For a few hours, they are in a distant time, a dissipated past, a disembodied version of themselves that is younger or wiser or easier or just different. Possibly even best friends. And Joshua has so many questions he doesn't ask, and sitting here, he thinks that Jeonghan must have some, too. A few hours are up too fast, and they come crashing back into this world less than halfway through the season. The episode is put on pause.

Joshua feels foolish.

Jeonghan leaves—

 

Joshua likes sunny days. It's a small pleasure that he loses sight of in the pallid winter. In the asphyxiated classrooms of senior year, he had forgotten what it felt like to bask in the light. High in the bleachers, close enough to hear the wind sieving through the holes of the chain link fence that tops the stands, he is miles away from the verdant football field and as close to the sun as close to the sun as he can get. There's never a breeze on the ground unless it has been painstakingly drawn out of a fan. Altitude gives Joshua a sad kind of awe.

As the underclassmen filter in, a raucous human ooze, Joshua is surprised to recognize a few faces: Wonwoo, Soonyoung, even a few students in the freshman crowd, kids who must have sneaked into Jeonghan's parties. None of them notice his perch, except perhaps Wonwoo, who looks up and finds him immediately with a wordless nod of acknowledgment. Jihoon is not there, and Joshua doesn't know if that's better or worse.

The athletes are milling about the field, decked out in school t-shirts and jerseys. Near one of the goalposts, some of the football players have started a game of catch. Jeonghan is there, his lithe form unmistakable from any distance. Jeonghan is fast, and Jeonghan is everywhere, tossing the ball as he runs past the expanding pool of catch players, flipping his sun-dried hair as he chats with the coaches, folding his arms as he stands next to the relay equipment and faces the rising din of the stands. It's not hard to see his eyes are scanning, searching for someone. It's not Joshua. Jeonghan frowns, fruitless. It's so easy to see down, but it's near impossible to see up.

The speakers crackle to audibility and the pep rally begins. There's screaming. There's singing. There is, dutifully, a relay race. Jeonghan stars, captivating the entire crowd in a spirited roar. He sprints through hula hoops and soccer balls and returns, triumphant, sweaty, dazzling. Yoon Jeonghan, star. The race isn't over, but his victory is unquestionable; there is no other possible outcome when it comes to him. He comets across the field like a fish in water. The rest of the relay is eclipsed. His name is being chanted, three emphatic syllables on repeat. Behind him, the relay continues. In front of him, this loop continues, too, despite smatterings of applause and adolescent chatter, the rhythm stretching to its limits, wavering, holding its breath, as if the school is waiting for something.

Jeonghan turns his face up toward the crowd again, soaking it absently while his eyes are ceaselessly seeking a less definable “it” somewhere in the stands so far from where Joshua is sitting, and then a shout ripples up the crowd and Joshua sees it, an ecstatic blur of striped shirt and white tennis shoes that soars surely out of the bleachers and finds its way to Jeonghan in the span of a stuttered heartbeat. Seokmin is smiling, and Joshua can see it even from the top of the bleachers because Seokmin smiles like all the stars in all the galaxies, a thousand suns that are unconditional and unrelenting, and Joshua can see flickers of the infinitesimal moment that passes between them in the second they lock eyes on the field, Jeonghan and Seokmin, before closing into the single greatest kiss that has ever graced the green.

For a moment, the world stops with its breath bated, and Joshua feels as if he is underwater, the weight of miles above him, ready to come crashing onto them all. Fear. For Jeonghan, for Seokmin. For the final verdict of the entire student body.

Then the bleachers erupt with the full force of four grades, and the cheers drown out everything else, and Joshua's ears pop, and Joshua can only stare, more awed than scared or shamed, a strange sort of pride electrifying the school, their star, their students, cheers, cheers, cheers . . . .

They pull apart, Jeonghan's hand resting around the far side of Seokmin's neck, grinning, giggling, glowing. A thousand standing ovations. It's the happiest Joshua has ever seen him, and they are so far apart. Jeonghan tousles Seokmin's hair, their arms staying around each other with an unabashed fondness. The relay hasn't finished, but it has been long forgotten. Joshua is swimming in a thousand feelings at once, so happy and so sore, his diaphragm burning ragged, as if he is the one who has been running the race.

Happy, he decides, swept into the brilliant wave of the crowd. It's so happy.

 _Victory_.

Jeonghan leaves—

 

 

 

 

 

“Let me get this straight,” Jun says, playing with the bendy straw in his smoothie. His slender fingers look like a daddy longlegs scuttling along the plastic, and it would honestly have been more than a little distracting if Jun wasn't pinning Joshua with some intense eye contact right about now. “You called me out here so that we could talk about Jeonghan?”

“Yeah, that's it,” Joshua confirms. He keeps expecting to see a different smoothies inside the cup, strawberry, like Jeonghan always picks, but Jun has gone for mango instead. They're sitting outside on the low, chair-height concrete barrier that fences in a thin gardening plot near the mouth of the mall. It's nothing outright spectacular, just some long grasses and maybe a few succulents here and there, except for their incredible resilience. Occasionally, someone walks in through the sliding doors and a rush of cool air grazes their knees.

Jun continues to look at him, eyebrows twisted like a confused pretzel. “Why me?”

“Because you're the only third party I can think of,” Joshua says. He had opted not to purchase a smoothie, and now he finds himself missing one. His fingers twitch momentarily, needing something to hold, and he stills them against the concrete.

“You don't have any other friends, do you?” Jun asks without malice. He is only matter-of-fact, and Joshua does not bother to answer. They both know that it's true. Jun’s hand freezes on the straw as he takes on a more serious tone. “You can't define yourself by who you are to one person, Joshua. The only way that ever works is if that person is yourself. You can't go looking for who you are in someone else. That's how we find other people. If you want to find yourself, you have to look in there,” Jun gestures at Joshua's head, “and in there,” Jun finishes with a nod to Joshua's heart.

“That's so cheesy,” Joshua frowns.

Jun takes a long, loud sip of his smoothie. “You're the one with all the love-angst. You figure it out.”

“'Love-angst’?” Joshua repeats, wrinkling his nose.

“You like him. He likes you. It's not hard to see. You live in the same place, go to the same school, speak the same language, know the same secrets, make the same mistakes. You're even the same age,” Jun shrugs, “You’d think it'd be a no-brainer, but you're not together, and maybe you're not supposed to be, or maybe you are. Maybe you could have been, or maybe it wouldn't have worked out anyway. Maybe it matters. Maybe it doesn't. But he's dating someone now, and you're a little bit liberated and a little bit heartbroken, and that's not hard to see, either.”

The curl of distaste has drained out of Joshua's face, quietly and unnoticeably, like water down a sink. Jun reads people too easily. So does Jeonghan, so does everyone, but in this moment, Jun is better at applying it than most. “So what do I do now?” he asks.

“Like I said,” says Jun, drinking normally now, “you figure it out.”

Joshua waits until his fingers feels like they can be moved without jittering. The baked concrete flashes something cooler when he removes them. It's hot outside, like any other day, and bright. There's a saying that March comes like a lion, and Joshua finds it to be doubly true in the scorching golden heat. The shrubbery laughs dryly behind them. There they are, sitting outside without shade, having a conversation and a mango smoothie.

The doors slide open, and there is a new laugh that Joshua recognizes. Jeonghan and Seokmin emerge with matching white shirts and dark blue jeans, evidently just off of a shift at Bath & Body Works. They're not holding hands, not discussing anything particularly deep, but Joshua can't tear his attention away from them. Talking. Laughing. Being a normal teenager. There's an intimacy about it that goes beyond touching. There's something perfect about it that Joshua can't forget.

“How do you work here, in front of so many people you know?” Joshua asks, his eyes returning to him once Jeonghan and Seokmin vanish into the distance. Jun has been patiently drinking his smoothie, and despite the hollow yowling of his straw meeting air, both of them have gone unnoticed. “Does it ever make you freeze?”

“Because I recognize them or because I'm scared of doing something stupid? Never,” Jun replies easily. He raises his smoothie almost like a toast, adding, “Now, if it's because I _have_ done something stupid, then that's something else entirely.” He lowers it. “I think it's nice, being around people. Everyone is thinking something different, and you'd be surprised how little of it has to do with you. Everyone is the center of their own universe. But that's me. I think there's a beauty in that.”

“I guess so,” says Joshua, unable to entirely wrap his head around a version of himself that does not hopelessly twine his thoughts around the wrong things, that does not hook his fingers into the wrong habits, that does not overthink. There's only a trace of it, an amorphous shape of it flickering at the edge of his imagination, but it might also be the sunlight. He looks at his hands, clean, neatly clipped nails and forgotten calluses and smudges of fading gray, and thinks, _maybe_. There could be hope in that.

“Also, you're forgetting that I also work at a salon now,” Jun says, taking another slurp.

Joshua blanches, suddenly, distantly recalling some impression of Jun having brought it up before. “You finished your training?”

“I did! It has its own building and everything,” Jun confirms. He doesn't seem to fault Joshua for forgetting and smiles with something easy and knowing. Still holding the mango smoothie in one hand, he stands up and points somewhere down the palm-lined street. “There. That little room with the neon sign? That's the one.”

“Jun, I can't see that.”

“Wow, and I'm the one who's semi-regularly getting contacts in the mail,” Jun rolls his eyes and pulls Joshua to his feet. His smile is so bright, and Joshua can't help thinking about Jeonghan's, and how there's a difference between brightness and stunning, but that doesn't stop him from appreciating the flash of light. “Come on, I’ll give you a tour.”

Joshua does.

Behind them, the decorative plants in the concrete box continue to grow even as the scenery changes. They're as real as anything.

They reach the tattoo and piercing parlor almost too soon, a silent lament going out as the door closes them in, the lion-like weather banished outside. A bell chimes above the doorway, and Joshua is reminded of the clinic, which had come equipped with its own bell, too. The door is only a little rusty around the hinges, and Jun successfully closes it on his second try without any dampening of his mood. If anything, he looks even more excited, like a kid in a candy store. Joshua catches the receptionist, an actual kid, sending him an amused look, evidently familiar with Jun's antics. Jun beams back without showing any hint of alarm that a kid has taken over the receptionist's desk, and Joshua can only conclude that it's normal for the smallest person in the room to pull out a stack of binders brimming with sheet protectors and place it on the table in the waiting area, carefully displaying them with the pages splayed open to reveal full-color images of elaborate tattoos. There's a coffee machine gurgling merrily against the wall. Above it are a series of square-framed pictures, each one showing off a different piercing. For the more educationally- or anatomically-minded, there are even a few diagram posters taped around the lobby, detailed black-and-white sketches of human bodies, faces, or ears crammed with labels and pain ratings and other notes. Most of the patrons in the waiting area are poring through the binders, however, ooh-ing and ah-ing at the visual parade of diamonds and infinity signs and stylized names, tracing the sure lines with their fingers. The sleek vinyl bench seating hugs the sides of the room, snaking from the battered door to the enormous windows to the receptionist's desk. There is no built-in lighting, and the only lamps are either standing on desks or in corners. Even so, the dim lobby is bathed in a brilliant pool of sunlight imported through these picture windows.

Joshua has barely registered the vibrant scene that welcomes him, barely stood there long enough to get over his sun-dazzled stupor in the stale air of the salon before Jun is excitedly tugging him around.

“This is the lobby. That's Samuel. He's great,” says Jun, waving to the tiny receptionist. Samuel waves back. He can't be older than twelve.

“Is it legal for him to work here?” Joshua asks, concerned as he watches Samuel offer one of the retrieved binders to a pair of older ladies with a goofy, well-meaning smile. “He seems kind of young.”

“Twelve and one-sixth,” Jun proudly confirms on Samuel's behalf. Samuel flashes him a thumbs-up with one hand, and the older ladies chuckle as they accept the binder, effectively charmed. Samuel delightedly returns to the desk, watching the door like a puppy waiting for it to open. There's a lightheartedness written all over his face, a complete lack of guile that leaves Joshua worried. His carefree childhood clashes jarringly with the maturity of the tattoo and piercing parlor. “Technically, he doesn't work here. He helps.”

Joshua wavers. “Is he okay being here?”

Jun softens. “We look after him,” he answers with a steady certainty that eases some of Joshua's worries. “He just has a lot more babysitters than most people do.”

The tour continues. The other piercers and tattoo artists are either busy or off, so Jun pinballs from one end of the lobby to the other, pointing out every single thing he lays his eyes on. Samuel half-listens from his post, occasionally laughing when Jun says something particularly funny. A few of the patrons glance up at them, too, entertained. If Samuel acts like a puppy, Jun runs around like a full-grown golden retriever.

“This is the mini fridge we keep in the back. It's full of Pepsi. For now,” Jun says, elbowing a squat, metallic thing that sits squarely against the wall opposite the waiting area, adjacent to the table set up with the ingredients for coffee.

He moves on. The adjacent table, where coffee is rumbling almost hazardously.

“This is our coffee machine. It never shuts up. Have you smelled it? Smell it, it's so good,” Jun says, taking a huge whiff of the glass pot. The carafe shivers with bubbles.

He moves on. The windows on the other side of the shop, plopping his knees in a broad open area of the bench between the enthralled customers.

“This is the sign I was talking about,” Jun says, his nose less than an inch away from the thick glass and blue light-up “COLLABORATION TATTOO & BODY PIERCING”, the letters packed tightly together in a glowing circle. Chinese characters caption it underneath. His eyes gleam the sun and the sky. “It's so cool, isn't it? They had it specially made in 2006 or 2008. I would always recognize it on my way to school.” He sighs dreamily. “For a long time, 'collaboration’ was the biggest word I could consistently spell.”

Jun flips around to sit properly on the bench. He checks if any of the customers would like to leaf through an album before pulling an open binder into his lap. Joshua stands at a distance, hesitant to sit. Jun scoots over, and Joshua gingerly joins him. With the binder now balanced on their parallel knees, Jun starts a sedentary tour, walking Joshua through the pages picture by picture. Joshua is starting to realize that Jun's tours are different from anything he's gone on before. Jun can put a name and a sweet anecdote to every face, sometimes navel, sometimes elsewhere that appears in the photo album. He talks about everyone like he knows them even if they couldn't have spent more than an hour together, bringing still images to life in a golden light. Jun is all animated hands and heart on his sleeve, easy expressions and so many happy stories that flow out of him like an endless untapped stream. Jun's voice fills the waiting area, and maybe there is a magnetism about Jun after all because before Joshua knows it, an orderly circle of patrons have been drawn in by the sound of his voice, his stories, listening to how he insisted on piercing his ears with a needle and an ice cube, how they created art by the soles of their feet on a dare, how she tattooed the wrong name on her arm and turned it into something beautiful.

“What kind of piercing is that?” Joshua asks, his voice hushed as they reach a picture of a gleaming metal ring snug around someone's upper ear like a promise.

“Helix,” Jun immediately answers. “A cartilage ring. They wanted something that wouldn't hurt. Helix piercings aren't supposed to hurt, but sometimes, they do. It's a rare thing, but it happens. This one hurt. They survived.”

Joshua realizes that he has been running two fingers over the curve of his own ear and lowers his hand. Jun notices.

“If you're thinking of another piercing, I think you can wait until another day. Give yourself some time to figure things out,” Jun says, the knowingness dancing at the edges of his smile. The backlight traces him in gold, so bright, not quite dazzling but sunlit all the same. “When you're ready, we'll be waiting.”

The tour continues.

 

Joshua cleans his room. Before he tackles his desk, he steels himself and excavates everything under the bed, sorting it, saving it, scrapping it. The boxes. The brochures. The spent cigarettes. It feels like scraping out some part of his soul, a hollow, indecipherable ache, and yet he does it, shoving the discarded pieces of himself into a plastic trash bag like he's cleaning up after one of Jeonghan's parties.

His mother catches him cleaning while she's on her way out, and she stops by to brush the hair out of his face with her fingers and squeeze his hand and give her approval. Joshua softens. So many of their moments are transitory, but they're there. Sometimes, it's not much help. Sometimes, it is. She has errands today and reminds him to watch the clinic. Before she goes, she fixes his hair one more time and tells him that he's a good son. Then he listens to her footsteps recede down the stairs and out the door, a beat as familiar and foreign as his own heart. He knows that they've both been wanting, vainly, to have that picturesque mother-son relationship with each other for over a decade now, but somehow, it's never the time. Joshua doesn't mourn it too much these days. The clinic is running. They have these moments. They're making do.

After tying up the bulging plastic bag, Joshua slings it over his shoulder and goes downstairs to throw it into their garbage. The litter that once felt so momentous in the darkest pits of his room is surprisingly light.

He opens the lid of the outdoor trash can, swings the bag off of his shoulder, and lets go.

 

Jeonghan throws a party.

The house is empty.

The kitchen is stocked, refrigerator shelves gridded by plastic containers of leftovers, neglected appliances dispersed across the countertops, iced tubs brimming with bottled water and soft drinks and beer. Someone keeps pushing the handle down on the toaster and waiting for the spring to pop back up without putting any bread in it. The basement is equipped with microphones and speakers for BooSeokSoon. The turnout is larger than ever, perhaps illusorily, the crowd filling every square foot of space, forming anamorphic fairy rings on the floor and resting chatty heads against the stark walls. The air conditioning is off, and the massive heat generated by so many bodies in one place is only offset by the fact that all the windows have been thrown open to let in the cool night rush of the vacant suburban street. Some people have taken to the window sills for seating. Someone has the bright idea to stand in one, framing the box with long legs and thick arms. There is so much action and movement in the house, the crowd pulsing with young extravagance, but it is empty.

There is no furniture. At all.

Like water without a container to hold it in, the teenage flow spreads into every corner unhindered. The house is empty, and any vestiges of caution, the mere possibility for fear of staining a seat or ripping a curtain, have left with its furnishings. Noise, bottle caps, makeshift spinners, music expand wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. The furniture has been replaced by an ebullient throng, stagnation by humming anticipation, a human picture. No one seems concerned about why it's gone or where it could have went.

Well. There's _one_.

When Joshua walks in, he finds Jeonghan immediately.

“I suck, you know that?” Joshua says, looking him in the eyes with every last ounce of intensity that can be contained within a teenage body. He didn't bring anything this time, didn't come with anything except his words and his feelings and his unutterable sincerity. All he has is himself, and all that's left is to hope it's enough.

“Actually, I think it's more like blowing,” Jeonghan says back, like it's a code they do, one thing meaning another meaning the sum of all things. White froth peeks over the lip of his bottle, the foam crackling disproportionately under the symphonic mountain of the party, threatening to spill over his fingers. But it won't. That's Jeonghan.

Just like that, Jeonghan exits the kitchen, beer in hand, and lets Joshua walk them to the back porch. Once there, they stop, facing out into that age-old unknown. Instead of sitting, they are standing at the horizon line, facing out over the edge of the world, out of the reaches of the residual light from the house, at the mercy of the glow of the stars. Joshua folds his arms over the wooden railing, and Jeonghan joins him at a distance, balancing his bottle on the beam. Out here in the safety of darkness, it's the most aware Joshua has ever been of the yawning chasm between them and how little it has actually done. It's all them.

It's always been them.

He starts.

“You're moving.”

It hangs there for a moment, weightless, like the moon in the sky. Jeonghan plucks it.

“Yeah, I am.” It's monumental, and it's not. “Want to guess where?”

Joshua doesn't need to. “Seattle.”

“Ding ding ding. We have a winner,” he says, sounding amused at the prospect of his life being a game show. Jeonghan tilts his beer, examining the froth. “The rest of the family went ahead to get settled. After graduation, I'm going to go, too.”

“What about Seokmin?”

“We talked it over. He said he could do long distance.”

“I think he could.”

“Thanks. I think I could, too.”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“Jeonghan, I was wondering—”

There’s a commotion inside. A door slams. Voices spike. The throbbing anticipation that has pervaded the party is being channeled into something else. Jeonghan lets go of his undrunk beer, frowning into the opaque house as if he can see right through it. Without even pausing, Jeonghan is walking back inside, steeled for his hosting duties, and Joshua follows. Below them, the band has stopped playing, and Joshua wonders when.

The basement door is wide open.

If Joshua squints into its shadow, he can see a fresh imprint where its lock had sunk into the plaster of the wall.

Someone is having a heated conversation at the threshold that separates the basement and the landing. It's not uncommon for arguments to break out, but if there is a ruckus, then it's Jeonghan's self-appointed job to break it up. Joshua glimpses Seokmin standing a little ways down the basement stairs and doesn't miss it when Jeonghan and Seokmin share a concerned look. Joshua slips through the transfixed crowd, the energy coming off in low, buzzing waves, like the group is itching for a fight, and tries to ignore the infectious thrum as he looks for a better vantage point. It's different from watching Jeonghan play sports. There is a disastrous feeling enveloping the party, and suddenly, Joshua just wants to breathe. But then, he also wants to ask his question. He turns around for Jeonghan, except Jeonghan's not behind him anymore.

Without knowing it, Joshua is at the threshold.

It's Soonyoung.

Then he’s punched in the face.

Joshua doesn't feel it. Maybe he's too surprised. Maybe the punch hit too much bone. Maybe he just doesn't care. There's a sting on his lip, a distant flare that appears and disappears with little fanfare. It doesn't hurt. Joshua is stunned more than anything, his hand automatically going up to touch his lip. It comes away red. He stands there blankly, barely noticing the next swings that glance off of his ribs or collarbones or shoulders or sternum as someone restrains Soonyoung. He didn't know Soonyoung could hit.

Maybe it's not about him.

Something wraps around his fingers, a hand. Before Joshua even looks up, before he can register anything else, he knows that Jeonghan is there, pulling him upstairs. They pass empty rooms that linger with phantom memories of Jeonghan's Seattle-bound family. Then they reach Jeonghan's, which is exactly as Joshua remembers it if everything was different. The furniture is exactly where it had been when Joshua left it so many months ago, but Jeonghan has done a lot of cleaning, too. Goodbye, papers. Goodbye, animal-patterned socks. Goodbye, unmade bed. Immaculate. It is the last, clinically-laundered remnant of the home that was once inside this house. Entering it when it has been stripped down to its essence, so picturesque that it could have come out of a magazine, dazzles Joshua with the light of a thousand flashing memories. A thousand is not nearly enough.

Jeonghan closes the bedroom door, and there they are, Jeonghan and Joshua, alone.

If Jeonghan notices that it's been a long time since Joshua has been up here, too, he doesn't stop to relish it. Agitated, Jeonghan curtly marches into the adjacent bathroom and flips through the drawers until he finds a pack of gauze sponges. Ripping it open without ceremony, he looks annoyed when Joshua isn't already seated and orders, “Get on the counter.”

“Why the counter?” Joshua asks even as he obeys. His senses are coming back to him, but oddly, he's not sore, just cold where his skin meets the marble.

“So I don't have to break my back just to reach your stupid face, you shit,” Jeonghan snaps back, his fingers stumbling to pull out one of the airy woven squares. He's trembling a little, and several fall to the floor in snowy drifts. He ignores them without looking up, and Joshua blankly fights his surprise at the sharpened edge to his voice. When the snow keeps falling, Jeonghan lets out an aggravated groan and plucks a sponge out of one of the drifts.

Jeonghan reaches to dab the gauze sponge on Joshua's lip and curses when he drops it again, losing the flickering red stain on the clean white floor. Instead of kicking it away, Jeonghan just digs through the stiff paper prism for another one. It's like the discarded sponge hadn't been there to discard in the first place. Something about it burns Joshua like the fading ember of a cigarette on the sidewalk, a mundane indignation he never has quite figured out. If it's so disposable, why pick it up in the first place? Why press it to his skin and blood and let it go like it hasn't been touched by the human hand of existence? Even Joshua doesn't spare a glance at the smoldering sponge. He's too magnetized just staring at Jeonghan, whose hands are shaking and gauze is falling and mouth is spewing a litany of obscenities, running free on its own accord and cursing up a storm, and if Jeonghan notices, he isn't stopping to show it. Jeonghan is all motion as he tries to bandage a superficial cut on someone who can't be so easily fixed. It's one problem substituted for another. A metaphor.

“You're cleaning it wrong,” Joshua finally says as gauze meets his cut. It stings, but he doesn't wince.

“Yeah, no shit,” Jeonghan growls, closing the blood-striped square in his fist before throwing that away, too. “Joshua, what was that out there?”

Joshua shrugs. “I don't know.”

“Bullshit.”

Jeonghan doesn't even look up.

This does make him want to wince, serrated and unforgiving. Instead, Jeonghan is already pulling at another square, and Joshua asks, “What happened to not cursing?”

“I don't. You're the only one who drags it out of me,” Jeonghan says, exasperated. He dabs it at Joshua's lip again, smearing blood. There's a window behind the sink, cracked open to let in the air, and Joshua can feel the stagnant night on his back and all around them. Jeonghan silences, terse, biting his own lip in fuming as he cleans Joshua's, as if he must offset the disgust on his face with the gentleness of his hand.

Joshua has never seen Jeonghan this mad.

Abruptly, Jeonghan stops.

“This is why we can't be together.” Jeonghan is mad, but he is still Jeonghan. The epiphany spirals out of him with vigorous, frustrated awe. He looks up. “We curse. I drink. You smoke. We know too many things. We were inseparable for the better part of the year, and that was one of the best and worst times of my life. Smoke and fire, right? It's so easy for me to like you, Shua, and why wouldn't it be? We're perfect for each other.” At this, something changes, and Joshua can't tell what, but Jeonghan is no longer mad. He glides over the pause. “I can't say that you haven't made me a better person, Joshua, because the thing is, you have. No way am I going to even attempt to list it all out for you, you little shit, but you taught me what it's like to _care_ about a person. You taught me what it's like to have a best friend. You make me _me_. This. How can I even begin to thank you for that? How can I not love you for that every time I look at you? But Seokmin makes me happy. I want to know everything about him, and everything about him is just so good and happy and without strings in a way that is just so different from everything we are. He's an open book, and I want that, no skeletons in the closet, no dirty secrets, no subtext. I want to be like that. I don't know if even I can understand it, but whenever I'm with him, it's like I don't have to be afraid of being a good person. I don't have to be afraid of being happy. I—”

Jeonghan stops with a sigh, losing his words, but the last dregs of anger have left him by this point. He is only reminiscing, and the faint traces of a smile pass over his lips, happy and sad and ironic and wistful and hopeful and a thousand other things Joshua can't and won't even attempt to name.

They're close enough to kiss, if they had any interest in that sort of thing, and now that he's seeing Jeonghan for real, the bits and pieces of his best friend laid bare like the exposed inner walls of an elaborate vase that has been cracked open only to find that its inside is so elegantly simple, Joshua realizes for what might be the last first time that maybe Jeonghan notices it, too. Maybe Jeonghan has always noticed it. Jeonghan glances down at Joshua's lips and pulls back. They don’t kiss. It’s not happening. It’s never happening. He takes the warmth with him, but also an undefinable weight. A lightness, a confusing and inexplicable freedom, like a rope that he been untied between an anchor and a balloon, takes its place. Their secrets, freed. Their subtext, freed. Their souls, freed. Air. Relief.

“Also, I know you're dealing fake weed to the entire school, and that's kind of a turn-off.”

Despite everything, Joshua actually throws his head back and laughs.

It's not funny, but it is. It's so, so laughable.

"Moxa, marijuana. I know you," Jeonghan sighs, the many-faceted smile tearing at the seams. He feels it, too, setting down the gauze. “You're a cruel one, Joshua Hong. And ridiculously lucky that Soonyoung didn't break any of your teeth.”

“Is that what that was about?”

“I don't know,” Jeonghan admits, “but Soonyoung cares a lot about his friends, and last I checked, one of them is Jihoon. Honestly, even if we're not focusing on the part about you dealing fake drugs, you're really stupid, you know that?”

“I know,” Joshua says, and he feels so inexplicably glad that they can talk about this, that they can still banter like this. His hand plays with the gilded faucet handle without turning it on. He has a sudden sympathy for the partygoers who had been fascinated with the toaster. Some things don't need to have a definable point to be understood. “I’m going to have to apologize to him, aren't I?”

“Not my job to tell you,” Jeonghan shrugs, an old teasing lilt to his voice as he stows the gauze away. Joshua hadn't noticed when he'd stopped, and counts one more loss as the pack disappears into a drawer. It doesn't hurt, though, and there's something strangely beautiful about the normalness of it all. There's always something beautiful about Jeonghan. “Though I'm still hoping you'll be smart enough to stop before someone gives you a lot more than a split lip.”

“Yeah,” Joshua says, “me too.”

There is a long pause, and Jeonghan doesn't press it, but he doesn't seem like he's ready to let it slide, either. _I'm not kidding, Joshua_. It's something they both know. Standing there in the bathroom, tall and alone, Jeonghan looks infinitely close and out of reach, like a sequence eternally being divided in half but never quite reaching zero. Never breaking even. The cool marble counter digs into Joshua's legs.

Jeonghan moves to leave the bathroom, then pauses.

“Wait. Earlier, out on the porch, before that fiasco, you had a question, didn't you?”

Joshua smiles with something warm. Right. That.

Jeonghan has already answered it, but Joshua says it anyway, hoping beyond everything that Jeonghan can see how much he means it.

“You and Seokmin are good together. I was wondering if you were happy.”

Jeonghan looks at him, and his face softens into the most dazzling smile of them all, a star of his own. Joshua feels the moment stretch out between them like a guitar string being pulled as far as it can go without breaking. He wants to hold it, wants to listen to it, wants to trace it with his fingers forever. Joshua. Jeonghan. His best friend.

He is hit with the immutable knowledge that they are leaving, and for once, it doesn't scare him.

There's nothing happier, nothing sadder, nothing more bittersweet than that.

Jeonghan ruffles Joshua's hair.

“Thanks. I think I could be.”

 

 

 

 

 

Joshua peruses the mall on his own.

His stamina is getting better.

He passes Jeonghan and Seokmin at Bath & Body Works, and they pull him into the conversation with ease, just three teens, talking. Laughing. They could be anybody.

He passes Jun at Claire's, and, evidently in a good mood, his manager looks the other way with the grudging hint of a smile as they strike up their own conversation at the checkout. Joshua purchases an octopus plushie and opts not to use a bag for it. When he leaves, he holds it up and pinches one of its legs between his thumb and index finger to wave goodbye, feeling a little ridiculous in a good way. Jun giggles, and he even receives an amused eye-roll from the manager.

He passes Soonyoung at his kiosk, and the latter perks up when he sees Joshua. They're on good terms, though Joshua has been guiltily bringing him random gifts for the past week, and Soonyoung likes them too much to complain. The octopus prompts him to show off an impression with his hands, and Joshua stays a little longer, genuinely interested. He is thrilled to hear that Jihoon liked the album he recommended. He has been realizing that about himself lately. He likes listening. To music, to impressions, to people.

It's different without Jeonghan, but it's passable.

Inevitably, Joshua's perusal comes full circle to the fountain. He doesn't need to think hard to imagine the thousands of Jeonghans and Joshuas who have wrapped up their adventures in this very spot, who are acting stupid, who are flipping coins, who are talking about life. He doesn't, though. The April air is gentle. The fountain glimmers over its countless coins. Water laps at the edge. The weather is nice today.

He sits.

Runs his hand over the water.

Looks up.

It's a good day.

 

School feels different with seniority, or maybe it's senioritis. Joshua remembers Jeonghan swearing that he wouldn't be the sentimental type come spring, and though they've each been spending more time on their own lately, he doesn't fail to notice the lingering looks and reluctant reminiscing that Jeonghan throws toward the library, the science labs, even the trophy case, which he has always bemoaned for its pretentiousness despite his role in its accouterment. Amused, Joshua wonders if this is what he looked like when they went to Claire's before he got his piercings, that _what if_ , that farewell, and Jeonghan elbows him hard in the ribs in return, pretending to examine the display while Joshua is doubled over trying to catch his breath.

One day, he catches Jeonghan and Seokmin eating lunch in Jeonghan's car. Jeonghan rolls down the window to shout hello, and Joshua, charmed, lopes over and greets him politely in return. Spying Seokmin tossing a large salad in the passenger seat, the takeout bag set on the dashboard, Joshua has an idea.

“Do you mind if I borrow your boyfriend?” he asks, blurting it out before he can second-guess himself.

Jeonghan and Seokmin share a look, and Jeonghan says, “Go for it. But you better have him back by ten.” A smile slides across Jeonghan's face, and Seokmin rolls his eyes with an exaggerated groan as Jeonghan tacks on, “Curfew.”

Jeonghan casually plucks a crouton out of Seokmin's salad as the latter exits the car. Seokmin makes a face at him, and Jeonghan makes one right back. With Jeonghan conspicuously leaving the window down, Joshua leads Seokmin a considerable distance farther to a bench just outside the parking lot and starts talking.

He talks about Jeonghan.

He talks about himself.

He talks about a lot of things. The plastic stars. The parties. The profanity. The profoundness. The way Jeonghan's eyes light up when he talks about Seokmin. He doesn't know what it is or how he phrases it, the conversation blurring together into one seamless, timeless stream, but he says it. He talks, and what's totally wild is that Seokmin listens.

At the end of it, Joshua says, “Jeonghan is a good person. The best. Take care of him, okay?”

Seokmin nods. _Okay_.

Back at the car, Jeonghan dramatically brandishes the salad, which he has finished tossing on Seokmin's behalf. Seokmin laughs and accepts the plastic bowl through the window, and a fork, too. Jeonghan grins up at him, then rolls it up and gets out of the car. Joshua hadn't even realized that he had talked all the way through lunch. Jeonghan offers Joshua some leftover fries, and Joshua claims that it's unfair how Jeonghan knows his weakness to fried food even as he chews on it. They walk together like that, Seokmin forking through his salad, Joshua wolfing down the fries, Jeonghan somewhere between the two.

They drop Seokmin off at his next class, Jeonghan pecking him on the cheek near the corner of his mouth, and take the remaining salad off of his hands. Jeonghan and Joshua split lettuce and cherry tomatoes, so used to acting like it's completely normal for two students to strut down the center of the hallway with an enormous plastic feast balanced between them that it kind of is. None of the teachers pay them any mind, and finally, victoriously, they properly dispose of the picked-clean bowl in one of the trash cans near the stairwell. Seniority. They've learned things.

There is only a flash of sadness and something else when they reach the science lab; this is where they part ways, and even if it's just for their next classes, Joshua remembers that there are so many things they still haven't said, so many things that they might never address. Memories. Feelings. Mysteries. People. Jeonghan lingers in the doorway with that same look he gets when he thinks no one is watching, young and old and nostalgic and changing. Senioritis.

“I'm going to miss you, Shua.”

“Yeah,” Joshua says, “me too.”

Joshua watches Jeonghan leave for his classroom, and then Joshua enters his, too. It's a bittersweet feeling, and, strangely enough, somewhere in there, not quite lost among all those uncertainties about the future, he feels a spark of something else. Maybe it's love. Maybe it's loss. Maybe it's hope. It's strangely giddy.

Joshua finishes the fries.

 

An upper helix in his left ear.

Joshua made an appointment at the parlor and everything. It's not Claire's, and it has nothing to do with Jeonghan. Except that it also kind of does, because it's impossible to say that Jeonghan hasn't shaped him, too. That's who he is. It's who they are.

It reminds him of the clinic, the back room, the endless counters and sterile floor. It's more decorated in here, though. There are framed photos, certificates, and even contemporary art mingling on the wall. Joshua takes it all in unhurriedly while Jun busies himself with setting up.

There's no fear driving him this time. It's all Joshua.

He takes his time, letting it sink in. There’s something he wants to relish about that, something that he wants to hold on to and let go of at the same time. There’s something beautiful about that. The warm flicker of a moment paints his consciousness in a golden light. There’s something sore there, too, but Joshua is as ready as he’ll ever be. Win some, lose some. Keep going.

“You'll be okay?” Jun asks, holding the needle up to Joshua's ear.

“Yeah,” Joshua says. Something in his chest feels light. “I'll be okay.”

(Later, Joshua still smells like cigarettes if he breathes hard enough, and Joshua still feels like shit on some days that end in y, but Joshua is still breathing, and Joshua is still wandering, and Joshua is, in fact, okay.)


End file.
